


Follow You Home

by claimedbydaryl



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Brainwashing, Canon-Typical Violence, Depression, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Eventual Smut, Happy Ending, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Identity loss, M/M, Memory Loss, Nightmares, Past Torture, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Slow Build, Suicidal Thoughts, and honey nut feelios, discussion of consent, so that means sex, the presence of fluff is debatable, the usual recovering Bucky spiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 13:47:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 45,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4481546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claimedbydaryl/pseuds/claimedbydaryl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve followed the ghost of a man he once knew into the cold depths of Europe, his single-minded diligence even unsettling Sam after their initial months of searching through long-dead HYDRA bases and meandering paper trails. Sam soon leaves, and Steve continues persisting in his efforts as Bucky lingered on the edges of his vision.</p><p>As Bucky tried to sift through the fragmented remains of his mind, he is drawn to the memory of the man he also once knew, and the two soon come to an inevitable head following the aftermath of a free-fall into an icy German river.</p><p>Bucky had been at Steve’s side from the beginning—when his grin was full and easy in Brooklyn, after Italy when it was grim and fleeting, and then when he wasn’t even there to smile anymore—and so Steve tried to find a reason to make him smile again throughout the slow, painful and tedious process of recovery that will both break and mend the two intertwined souls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Follow You Home

**Author's Note:**

> Just a few things worth mentioning:  
> \+ Angie, you are my sunshine, and this fic would not have come to fruition without you.  
> \+ Honourable mentions to whoever (Kelsey) talked shampoo scents with me.  
> \+ This fic turned into more than I ever dared it to be, and trust me when I say I didn't mean to write it so nostalgic and almost depressing in tone (there is a cheesy-ass happy ending, I promise).  
> \+ I have an undying respect for Sam Wilson as a character and friend.  
> \+ Based on headcanons, and knowledge of canonical MCU events.  
> \+ Set after Winter Soldier, but as Steve relinquishes his position of Captain America in his search for Bucky, alas Age Of Ultron never happened.  
> \+ In no way is this an accurate depiction of dealing with trauma/depression of any kind.  
> \+ I think Bucky broke his Winter Soldier conditioning in the first two years of this fic, but he needed to be in direct contact with Steve to break that last barrier.  
> \+ I tried to tag all triggers, so heed the warnings.  
> \+ Title is based on Shinedown's "I'll Follow You".  
> \+ Unbeta'd.

_32557038_ —

His place in the world was the first thing he lost.

 _Sergeant James Barnes_ —

And then his name; his identity.

 _Steve Rogers_ —

He couldn’t remember the man’s face. He couldn’t remember coherent words, full sentences, or specific locations. He couldn’t remember his past. His memories were limited to a mere blur of blond hair, a body distorted out of shape, fleeting hands on his cheek and back and arm—

 _Steve Rog_ —

A broad smile in the dim, grimy light of a dilapidated apartment—

 _Stev_ —

Being pulled from a gurney, and then failing to hold out his hand on a train, and watching as the man on the bridge befell the same fate in the Potomac, an invisible—an explicable, dangerous, unnameable—thread in his chest pulling, pulling, _pulling_ —

 _S_ —

Surfacing from a river, violently coughing, blood and water swirling in his mouth. His shoulder ablaze with white-hot agony, hanging grotesquely out of its socket. Fire above and water below. A choice in which he acted on instinct rather than precise calculation.

And then, finally: _Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, best friends since childhood…_

*

Bucky ran.

And Steve followed.

Because Bucky had spent his entire life with his arm outstretched to Steve, whether it was pulling him from the ground of a dirty alleyway, keeping him afloat through a fever which threatened to burn him alive or desperately reaching out to Steve as he jumped across a hellish inferno.

Because he was everything to Steve before Steve was anything.

Because Steve had only chance to prove that to Bucky and he failed. He watched his life crumble in seconds, he’d watched it end—his hand empty and cold and grasping at nothing as the icy rush of mountain air whipped his head, the force threatening to blow him off the side of the train. And he was most vulnerable then—it didn’t matter he was stripped of his shield, his ribs singing with pain and his communication having long being severed—because Bucky wasn’t there anymore.

He was alone, and he was selfish enough to think it simply affected him.

And then Steve was freefalling in a plane, nose-diving into the Artic to save everyone else’s life except his. His head was swimming with a million different thoughts—Erskine, Peggy, his Ma, the Howling Commandos, an empty apartment in Brooklyn—but a sudden and sick realisation was more daunting than his impending death. He wasn’t designed to survive this world without Bucky, not even with a serum flowing through his veins and armed with an unbreakable shield.

Sometimes it still felt like Steve was strapped to the helm of that plane, everybody calling him a hero—a martyr even—when all he wanted to do was be with the one person who understood him.

Maybe it was because in the moment Bucky died Steve knew he had to do the same. Maybe it was because Steve hated the world he woke up to—modern and shining, yet still corrupt at the core, only better at hiding it—and he wished to share cold Brooklyn nights with another warm body in a spindly iron frame bed, of scrounging enough money together to buy bread that was warm and fresh and whole, when the only coffee choices were either bitter black or white.

His search for Bucky had started at the helm of Fury’s grave, his fingers grazing over Bucky’s face—once grazing him in his army uniform but lingering on his best friend encased in a cryogenic chamber. His hair was long, and his eyes were closed and remained frozen—a weapon ready for use.

“When do we start?” Sam had asked, a steady presence standing at his back.

Steve couldn’t answer him then, but he knew it would be soon. Sam offered Steve a seat in his car to read Bucky’s file before excusing himself to grab something to eat. Steve knew he wasn’t hungry, but Sam was practised at reading emotions that people tried to keep hidden, and he let Steve have his privacy.

His fingertips trembled over the manila cover, unable to open it but every fibre of his being needed to _know_. Nat’s warning echoed in his head— _you might not want to pull on that thread_. But Steve was never going to accept Bucky; he was never going to be what he needed when the time come if he didn’t know what Bucky’d been through.

He was barely halfway down the first page when bile surfaced in the back of his throat. The words were so clinical, neat and to-the-point, reading like a report rather than a detailed description of what indescribable torture Bucky had been forced to endure. He was dragged through the snow, starved of the barest necessities, drugged and torn to pieces and stitched back together. He wasn’t human to them—he was an experiment, a test of science.

Bucky had been strapped down to a table, screaming in agony as Steve had sat in the ruins of bar, mulling over his inability to get drunk.

Guilt hit him hard and fast, overwhelming Steve in its intensity.

When Sam returned he didn’t mention how Steve was struggling to regulate his breathing, his head between his knees and fingers digging into his jeans painfully. He needed to feel something that wasn’t the weight of his thoughts, that wasn’t the pit of dread gnawing at his stomach.

Sam was brave enough to ask. “Steve—”

“He’s in Europe. He’d want to find out who he was.”

Sam shifted in the driver’s seat; hands curled around the steering wheel and head downcast.

“Why?”

“Because there’s a string of HYDRA bases still there, hidden under enough government red tape—”

“But why?” Sam repeated, hoping Steve would listen properly this time.

Steve sighed, turning his legs—uncomfortably, he was too big to fit—into the designated seating space. He closed the car door, dulling the outside sounds only to emphasise the silence between the two of them. “Because Bucky needs to do something, to be active.” He said. “He spent his entire life with something on his mind or another—he either had a job or a dame or a drink to fill his hands. Bucky couldn’t just sit around doing nothing, that wasn’t him.”

Sam paused, and Steve could already guess what his question would be.

“He doesn’t want to be found, Sam, I know that.” Steve sighed. “But it doesn’t mean I won’t try.”

Sam didn’t reply, instead turning the key in the ignition to occupy the still air.

Steve spent the next three days in his D.C. apartment, his drywall bearing the evidence of the bullet that had torn through there. He knew Tony had offered a whole floor at his tower in New York, but Steve wasn’t programmed to so readily accept charity—even if it seemed sincere on Stark’s part—so ready. Even though here his eyes were still drawn to the hardwood floor where Fury had bled out, and then his gaze flitted to the shuttered window where he had caught a glimpse of the Winter Soldier, a stranger with black combat gear and a sniper’s aim.

His gaze flickered across the last lines of the file, and his eyelids fluttered shut. Steve had long since taken residence in the bathroom, the tiles cold and sharp beneath his bare feet. The toilet bowel reeked of vomit, the porcelain rim smooth against his forehead. The feeling that gripped his stomach wasn’t akin to normal pain, instead it was raw and powerful and it _hurt_. His stomach was a mass of tightly coiled knots, a building headache pounding behind his temples.

It was over—he knew it all now.

 _The Asset expressed resistance to recalibration:_ Bucky was in pain, he was trying to fight them off; he was trying to remain James Buchanan Barnes.

 _Electroshock therapy is required to improve appropriate cognitive function:_ They wiped his memory; they made him forget so he could be a better soldier.

 _Active duty is not advised:_ He didn’t belong to them yet.

Bucky managed to resist them for days, weeks, months. But they eventually opened his skull and took the parts that made him human, that made him weak. He was deprived of sustenance and sleep and comfort. He was locked in a cell without a bed, without lights, and the moment he fell asleep he was woken up with blaringly loud noise. And sometimes his cell was brightly-lit, shrieking with chaotic, cacophonous sound until he could barely hear the sound of his own heartbeat, until his screams were silent even to him.

 _The Asset expressed minimal reflexive resistance to recalibration_ : He wasn’t himself, Bucky was acting on instinct rather emotion.

 _No alternative treatment is required, appropriate cognitive function achieved_ : He was a blank slate; ready to be moulded into whomever or whatever they wanted him to be—a killer, a sniper, a spy.

 _Recommended for active duty:_ Bucky was the Winter Soldier.

He contemplated calling Sam, but he couldn’t understand why Steve was even doing this, so how would he ever relate to what Steve was feeling now? Nat might’ve understood if she was here, but Steve felt like there was something she still wasn’t telling him about Bucky, so he remained quiet.

In the moment Steve decided he needed some air the feeling of suffocation was overwhelming him, his lungs struggling to work in a long-ago echo of an asthma attack. He couldn’t face the confines of the hallway, or his neighbour’s reactions, or spending one more second trapped inside his apartment. So he ran to the window, fingers fumbling at the lock, trying desperately to work it open. Steve heard an audible _click_ , and the wooden frame scraped against its foundations. He almost shattered the window forcing it open.

The fire escape was rickety and old, and once Steve heard its rusty bars shake under his weight his head exploded. It reminded him of when Bucky—the Bucky from a different time, with a quick smile and his eyes glinting in the dim light—would spend his nights on the fire escape, a cigarettes gripped between his fingers, bearing the cold so Steve wouldn’t choke on the thick, cloying smoke.

Somehow, Steve managed to shake himself out of his trance, leaping over the side to hit the ground hard. The force travelled through his entire body, his very marrow searing through his bones painfully. He gasped at the impact, rolling forward to lessen the damage.

Steve jogged to his motorbike, already recovering from his jump. He fished the keys from his pocket, unable to believe he’d been coherent enough to grab them on his way out. The bike rumbled to life between his legs, and Steve’s grip twisting fiercely to rev the engine. He bounced over the edge of the curb, wheels skidding on the road as the speed of his vehicle steadily increased in a mechanical roar.

He didn’t know where he was going; instead relying on muscle memory to find a secure path to follow—afterwards, he glimpsed the Smithsonian ahead and sighed deeply. Steve knew exactly what he’d been trying to do. He had searching for an image of Bucky that wasn’t drenched in blood, that wasn’t twisted out of shape and moulded into a plaything for an army.

Steve blinked once, twice, the fierce gust of wind causing his eyes to water and the sharp metal indents of the foot rest prickling the bare soles of his feet. He pulled a sharp right, jerking into a park. He manoeuvred the kickstand into place, trying to gain control of his breathing, control of his _anything_.

He swung off his bike, stumbling onto the sidewalk, collapsing to his knees. Steve couldn’t settle his mind; he couldn’t collect his thoughts or make sense of anything.

How had Bucky endured so much while he had survived, by fault?

Steve had pondered death while Bucky was forced to live—how was that fair?

The gravel was rough beneath his knees, grazing the fabric of his pants. He was glad it was dark, that no one could see him, helplessly curled over on the ground. The orange glow of the lamplight illuminated him on the street, casting a strange, heaving shadow that trembled with every gulping breath.

A sob was ripped from his throat, raw and despairing.

And then his name slipped unbidden from his lips: “ _Bucky._ Bucky, I’m sorry _.”_

Steve heard the quiet mutterings of a deep, masculine voice behind him, and before he had time to react it was over—a whisper of fabric, a quivering gasp, the fleeting, warm touch to his shoulder. Steve thought he’d almost imagined it, and when he turned he glimpsed the retreating back of a stranger—tall, male, a broad torso tapering to a slim waist, a ratty baseball cap pulled down low over greasy brown hair, and hands tucked into a nondescript brown jacket.

Steve breathed a word, a name. He was able to recognise him—that looping gait, the wide breadth of his shoulders, the tilt of his head—anywhere. Bucky. _Bucky_. A million different thoughts raced through his head, but he couldn’t seem to articulate a single one of them.

He tried speaking, he tried standing. But all Steve could do was watch as Bucky simply walked away, the swirling darkness swallowing him whole, reclaiming him. His feather-light footsteps echoed throughout the night, acting as the only source of noise amidst the street-quiet atmosphere.

Steve choked, tears streaking his face as he struggled to breathe, finally uttering Bucky’s name. It was too late—it had been for a while. Bucky hadn’t wanted to speak to Steve—hell, he probably wasn’t even meant to be here. But Steve’s chest rung hollow, empty, and he was never angrier with himself for not being able to stand up and run after Bucky.

Again, he’d just let him go.

His fists met the solid ground of the sidewalk, splitting the tender flesh of his knuckles open. Dirty grit embedded into his abused skin, bones grazing the cement, pain thrumming through him. Steve relished the agony, feeling as if he deserved to suffer for his inability to get the fuck up and do something.

He leaned back onto his haunches and screamed.

When Steve returned to his apartment the window was still ajar, and Bucky’s file was still resting serenely on the bathroom floor. It remained the same—dog-eared at certain pages, worn but still stiff with newness—but when he picked up the folder, marked with Russian lettering across the front, a page slipped from the sheaf. Somehow, it had been dislodged from the remaining pages—but Steve didn’t deny himself the knowledge how, he allowed himself that small mercy. He looked down, at the first mission report, gaze skimming the information regarding the Swiss base which had amputated Bucky’s mangled arm and attached a heavy metal weapon to the end of it.

Hand clutched around his mobile, Steve dialled the only number he knew and pressed it to his ear.

It picked up on the second ring.

“It’s Switzerland, Sam. He’s in Switzerland.”

*

Sam had once asked, “ _When do we start?”_ when he really should’ve asked, _“When will it end?”_

It took Steve a year to realise Sam couldn’t bear his own burdens as well as Steve’s. And it took another nine months before he could convince Sam he was right.

Because Sam had a family and a home and people who depended on him. He belonged in this era. He still had something to offer the world that was tangible, that wasn’t just an image of much-needed patriotism when the world was falling apart at the seams. Stark had seemed to have offered him a place in New York too, and the only reason Sam accepted was so Steve had a reason to return.

At first Sam had viewed the mission—it was a rescue mission, plain and simple—with optimism. He laughed often, smiled even more, and managed to find a decent radio station that played songs in English rather than the native tongue without fail. He knew Steve needed him, not reliance but something close to it, so Sam stayed.

But the nights grew longer, and colder. The threads of information were harder to grasp, whenever they rolled up to a fence that had longed waned under rain and wind and snow, overgrowth masking the front of a secret military base that had bustled with activity seventy years prior. Motel rooms offered little comfort, TVs blinking with a fuzzy quality and muted foreign languages in the early hours of the morning, and the aged plumbing groaning with effort as one of them risked a blast of icy-cold water for the sake of cleanliness. The food was bland. The people regarded them with wary eyes. The landscape was a monochrome stretch of desolation, twisting into isolated mountaintops and dense woodland.

“Steve,” Sam had said in their first month. It was long after they had found the Swiss base, a clear imprint of a hand on a dusted monitor, three guards with slit throats and the burnt remains of the east wing the only evidence Bucky had ever been there. That night Steve had washed his boots with a wire brush and gritty water with a fervour that had unnerved Sam, watching with his jaw clenched as Steve had desperately tried to erase the traces of ash from his boots.

Bucky wasn’t just discovering his past—he was remembering it all.

Sam breathed calmly through his nose before repeating himself. “Steve.” After a moments lapse he looked up from his place sitting on the edge of his bed, chin resting on his linked hands.

“Yeah?” He looked relatively the same, but his hair was lank and his eyes dull. Gone was the shining example of the pure American dream embodied, leaving a broken shell in its place. Even Sam seemed to forget that Steve was a person first and a symbol second—most people did.

“I don’t think…” He grappled for the right words, how to phrase it without offending Steve. “I don’t think you’re going to help anyone by doing this.”

“I’ll help _him_.”

“Bucky?” He probed. Steve never talked about him openly, even though Sam had tried. After a beats silence he opted for a different approach, “America needs you, Steve. I’m not saying doing this isn’t a fine and noble thing, but you’re more to the world than just one man’s friend—”

“I’m all he has, Sam.” Steve arranged his large hands on the edge of the mattress, gripping it tightly—anchoring himself. “It doesn’t matter who I am or what I am, if I can’t do this—” He swallowed thickly. “If I can’t do this for him now I’m not worth anything.”

“You’re Captain America—”

“I’m just a kid from Brooklyn!” Steve was on his feet now, his back ramrod straight and his chin lifted in determination. His gaze wasn’t cold, merely hard. “All I’ve ever been to Bucky was his friend, through thick and thin. We depended on each other. We loved each other. And the one time he needed me when I was Captain America I…” The words eluded him.

“You weren’t there,” Sam supplied quietly.

“He was so close. All I had to do was lean forward and—” He squeezed his eyes shut almost painfully, a sharp point of sharp pain driving his skull. His hand clenched with the phantom feeling of his fingers wrapped around a metal bar, his side pushed firmly against the warped side of a fast-moving train, the snowy abyss whirling below him.

“You couldn’t do anything.”

Sam was good at this—placating people who were full so of rage and fear and pain—but Steve didn’t need a kind word or a comforting gesture. He just needed to feel like his chest wasn’t completely hollowed out, like his dreams didn’t bear a greater likeness to nightmares now, like he hadn’t failed at the one single thing Bucky had asked of him.

“I could have saved him, Sam.” Steve said softly, like a confession. He rubbed his palms over his face to smooth the grit of sleeplessness and exhaustion, aimlessly. “And since I couldn’t help him then I’m going to now. It doesn’t matter what you or Fury or Nat say. This is my choice. My decision. The only person I’ll listen to right now is Bucky.”

Sam shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with the inevitable question Steve was forcing him to ask. Yes, Steve was his friend—but that didn’t make him any less stubborn or caring. Some people just felt things too deeply for rational thought—even though Sam felt as if an underlying reason followed Steve’s vein of self-sacrificing thinking. “But what if he doesn’t want you to help him?”

“Then I’ll wait until he does.”

Although there were legions more to say, to understand, the subject was concluded for now. Sam wasn’t going to go through the same conversation every night while Steve stared vacantly away from him, his gaze flitting over the rough wallpaper or faded prints, fatigue eventually laying its claim on him. And Steve was not willing to negotiate the terms of his own personal mission, for his sake or others.

Steve stepped out of their shared motel room the next day, the air already chilly with the pre-dawn light. The door clicked shut behind him—heralding the arrival of Sam, and the close shared space he managed to maintain, no matter what the circumstances. Steve’s hands were on his hips, his lungs rising and falling with the cold swell of air, gravel crunching beneath the soles of his boots.

And then a glimpse of movement in his peripheral vision—

The garish flash of sunlight on polished metal, a streak of red.

“Bucky,” he breathed, like a prayer.

“What?” Sam asked, appearing at his elbow.

Steve looked again—but Bucky was gone.

He shook his head, pointedly ignoring the glimmer of hurt and confusion in Sam’s expression. “Nothing.”

It happened once again the next month—Steve following Sam into a motel room again, stopping to adjust his rapidly-slipping grip on his duffel bag, another fleeting glance of silver and red flaring around the edges of his vision.

And then two weeks after—this time in a parking lot near some low-key restaurant, Steve fishing his wallet from under the small, cramped space under the seat, hearing the loud slap of wood as one of the restaurant’s doors slammed shut like a gunshot, a jacketed figure disappearing around a brick corner.

Another month passed and Steve was resting in a high-backed chair, watching over the darkened landscape of his motel room, counting the breaths Sam took in pairs. He closed his eyes, just for a moment, until the faint rattle of the window alerted him to an outside presence.

He hoped, he hoped with all his might it was him, but when the window creaked open and air escaped through the slitted frame, it stopped. Steve regulated his breathing, doing everything in his power not to make any sudden movements and scare Bucky, but he landed forward ever so marginally—and the chair uttered a wooden creak. The window slammed shut in a second. Defeated, Steve let his head fall against the cushioned upholstery and sighed deeply, uncoiling the twisted mass of his insides.

It carried on like that for months, when Steve broke his wrist when a small German bunker collapsed at his forceful intrusion and he thought he saw Bucky twice in a week. And when he and Sam had to share the backseat of their stranded car during a vicious winter storm he didn’t see Bucky at all for a while.

The first year ended and Steve took to telling Sam that he was allowed leave, and that he didn’t need this bearing down on him too. They’d both lost weight, although it was easier for Steve to retain fitness and muscle mass without regular exercise. The food was either simple and bland or commercially greasy, lacking in proper nutrients. Sleep was rare and difficult to gain. Logical thought processes were scarce. Steve and Sam acted on autopilot, going through the motions of eat, train, travel, sleep. Their armour and weapons were cleaned meticulously but rarely used, and their appearances and clothes were neglected in favour of a few more hours spent reading a crumbling research file, or putting a few hours between one failure and the next.

And one day, on the fringes of the Russia, the surrounding wilderness monotone in its snowy bleakness, Sam decided he had done all he could do.

The base was a little bigger than usual, a steel trapdoor the only evidence it had existed aboveground. The air was stale and damp with snowmelt seasonally leaking from the roof, a heady scent of pine clinging to the walls even inside the expansive cement structure.

Steve had combed through the cells, fingers grazing the numbers painted on the thick metal doors, paint peeling away now. He avoided the rooms where various straps crossed a leather chair, bolted to the ground and gleaming medical instruments still arranged neatly beside it.

The cryogenic chambers unnerved him the most, despite the two lone HYDRA agents he’d found with their brain matter smeared across a wall in a twisted imitation of a paint stroke. Steve made the effort to stare at the glass coffin for a few silent minutes, committing the still image to memory to inspire him—of how he needed to repay the lost years of Bucky’s life he’d spent, trapped.

Sam found Steve in the bowels of the base, in a long, narrow room that stretched on into endless rows of paperwork, hazardously stacked by names and dates. He was staring at the open pages of a file, gaze flitting over handwritten notes, the underlined sentences, all written in a language he didn’t understand. And when Steve looked up at Sam’s approach, his eyes were devoid of all human emotion—he was blank, quiet, cold.

Steve didn’t need him there anymore—in fact, Sam’s presence seemed to worsen his state of mind.

He booked the next flight out of there. Steve hugged him loosely at the airport, waiting at the mouth of the tarmac. He offered a weak, watery smile—a cruel parody of his former brilliant self.

“Be safe,” Sam said, his voice serious.

“I will.”

“Promise me.” He needed to hear it; otherwise Steve would kill himself without a reason not to.

But Steve didn’t answer, instead he took a step back—out of Sam’s warm, comforting embrace—and left.

He didn’t touch another human being for three months.

*

He watched apathetically as the other man—everyone was just another person to him, Steve was the only one deserving of a name—watched Steve walk away from him. He felt the inklings of emotion rise in the pit of his stomach, growing in its intensity every day.

He was jealous—he didn’t understand.

Sad— _he didn’t understand._

Guilty—

_he—_

_didn’t—_

_understand._

It was tiresome, to retain all the thoughts and feelings of Bucky Barnes but failing to embody him. Anger rose bitter in the back of his throat at his inability to comprehend simple human emotions. His speech was less clinical, more adapted to the casual nature of modern-day society.

It hurt though. Slipping between time periods and personalities and memories. The space between waking and sleeping was the worst, when he thought Brooklyn was mighty cold this mornin’, wondering why Steve’s small, frail body wasn’t there to retain his warmth, and his gaze soon dipping to the left at the heavy weight of his arm—

He shook his head from side to side in an attempt to dislodge the thought, and the pounding of confusion and fear that followed.

Diverting his focus, he recalled how he had watched as the other man had tried to help Steve, the easy way they could share space or conversation, the undisputed agreement that no matter what happened they had each other’s back.

His memories were fragmented, returning in flashes of clarity, but he knew he and Steve had been like that once—maybe more, maybe not. But they had been able to smile, or laugh, in each other’s company. But the specific details of _what_ they smiled about or _why_ they had laughed remained a blank canvas, ready to be filled. It was blurry and shapeless, like a ruined strip of film. Empty. Damaged.

Everything was there, in his grasp, but he could never seem to translate it.

His nightmares, however, remained.

And so did pain.

And the Winter Soldier.

Time passed slowly at a glacial speed which nauseated him, because between missions it had been fleeting hours, not rounded days. Minutes. Seconds. At one point it had felt like years since he had felt anything remotely real, or tangible, just that endless radio static that crackled inside his skull—waiting for a purpose to fill it.

Steve was in southern Germany now—the place caused a tremor to roll through him, unbeknownst to why. Across the street from the warehouse he was positioned in, a small rectangle window offered a glimpse into Steve’s motel room. He’d hadn’t stepped a foot outside for eight days now, planning a trek through the poverty-stricken Balkan region of Europe on a long-winded note that mentioned an unearthed grave in a local cemetery, the end to another identity he had worn in place of his own.

Steve appeared in the clear space of a window, dressed in a thick, fur-lined jacket and fitted pants, and he felt that _pull_ again. The thread of memory—of a million other things. He wanted to do so much but yet he couldn’t differentiate between the separate voices in his mind, he couldn’t understand if he was meant to kill or protect, he couldn’t barely grasp rational thought. Steve made him feel weak—like he had no control.

His hand burned where he had touched Steve, years ago, on the ground of a broken cement sidewalk.

Even though that was the only time he had felt as if he knew himself.

Before he had started to remember what they had done to him.

And so, he moved with a fluid-like grace, catapulting through the shattered window of the abandoned warehouse he’d observed Steve from, landing on his feet and metal arm. The gears and mechanisms of the weapon shifted and adjusted to the sudden force, a faint buzz of electricity travelling through his frayed nerves.

He found Steve’s rental car—sedan, blue, economical.

And he severed the brake lines.

*

Steve realised it too late, tyres screeching along a narrow mountain pass, his heartbeat loud in his ears.

And he watched as the front of the car drove straight though the flimsy metal barrier and then—nothing.

His vision was clear and calm—a peaceful image of the jagged mountaintop horizon ahead, the sweeping landscape laden with a thick layer of white snow, the sky tinged pink with dusk—before he started to roll, roll, roll—

*

Bucky watched the car descend from the road’s edge, grey stones scraping steel and twisting metal, the panicked cry rising above the sound of wreckage—

—and he had never been more scared in his life.

“Steve!”

*

The car had travelled down the rocky slope to the waiting river below, sinking in the mud, water rushing through the open windows. He choked, and thrashed, his attempts to fight the incoming rush of water futile. Steve’s reached for his seatbelt, for the buckle that would free him, but a bolt of searing pain tore through him. He gasped, swallowing a mouthful of filthy water that burned his eyes and his nostrils with an unholy fire. He didn’t dare move again—for fear of pain, and the slowly fading will to survive this.

But Steve felt a hand grip the fabric of his shirt front, the weight strapped over his chest easing, of being ripped him from his seat.

He thought he remembered the fresh wave of hurt, tearing though his chest, and screaming again; air bubbles escaping his mouth to float towards the surface.

And then his world wasn’t limited to the dark, unfiltered depths of a river. He tried breathing, he tried moving—an instinct he couldn’t deny. The hand at his shirt disappeared suddenly, before Steve could reach the riverbank, and he floundered before finding a decent footing and pushing forward—ignoring the fuzzy quality of his thoughts, and the pain which told him to remain still and let the river sweep him away.

Steve’s feet slipped on a pebbled riverbed, surging forward with his last remnants of his strength until his knees hit the ground and his body followed soon after, near collapsing. His wet clothes clung to him, cold slicing the vulnerable exposed skin of his palms, blinking back tears to combat the sting of dirty river water. He coughed, spluttering, sparing a glance at the wreckage he had been pulled from—

He was pulled from the wreckage, _rescued_ even—

Gritting his teeth to bear the pain, Steve leaned onto his haunches to properly look at the car, and the water rushing past it, and the slim, silver piece of metal which reached for the surface before slipping forever beneath the murky depths of the river.

Steve didn’t need to think—he fully straightened before diving into the bruising force of the rapids.

His hands grazed wet, silken hair before his fingers dug into the thick leather which stretched across Bucky’s chest, arms wrapping around his smaller torso, legs kicking out to knock the hard surface of a rock. He felt the current of the river pushing him backwards—could hardly think over the force of it—but it was clear Bucky was stuck.

He repositioned himself, with his feet planted firmly on the riverbed and Bucky pressed flush to his chest, water invading his mouth and eyes and ears, crushing him, and he put everything he had—every last vestige of hope and strength and determination he had—and Steve _pulled_.

He carried Bucky to the safety of the riverbed by the fabric of his leather jacket. He didn’t know much—couldn’t comprehend half of the situation—only that Bucky was here, and he needed help. His mind worked in fast succession, more situated to high-octane situations, and Steve rolled Bucky onto his side. He started rubbing Bucky’s back vigorously, ensuring his airways were open, needing him to breathe.

“Bucky, I need you,” he said, spitting out river water, tasting blood and filth. “Please.” His voice sounded strained and raw, even to his dulled hearing. “Come on; don’t do this to me now. I need—Buck, I need you to stay with me.” He blinked furiously, trying to clear his blurred sight.

Steve stared at his pale, shaking fingers—wound into Bucky’s hair in a desperate grip, another placed high on the side of his ribcage. “Please,” he stumbled over the word—pleading now. “Bucky, please.”

And then the sound of coughing and spluttering—Bucky’s disconcertingly still eyelids fluttering open, pink water spilling from his lips, his body trembling.

Steve felt a ghost of smile pull at his lips, but he proceeded to rub Bucky’s back, focusing on him instead.

“Come on, that’s it,” he said quietly.

And Bucky stopped—eyes rising to Steve’s face as if he didn’t know he’d been there a moment ago. His mouth shaped a word— _no_ —and then he was scrambling backwards, crying out as his body failed to adjust to the sudden movement and weight of his actions.

“Bucky—” Steve began.

“Don’t.”

“Buck, please—”

“ _Don’t._ ”

He stopped—they both did. The two of them stared at each other, bedraggled and wet and desperate on the side of a riverbank in the isolated European wilderness, half-drowned and bones singing in pain. He may be slipping into the dangerous embrace of hypothermia, but all Steve could do was stare. He drank in the mere sight of Bucky, having been starved of it for two years—thick brown hair, the resigned expression in his eyes, a barely perceptible snowflake caught on the angle of his cheekbone, melding to his water-slick skin.

“Can I—” Steve couldn’t speak, could barely think. “Are you—”

“I cut the brake lines,” Bucky stated, slowly, like he had to relearn the words himself. His accent was odd, devoid of his Brooklyn roots but lacking that distinctive Russian lilt Nat sometimes slipped into.

“I—I thought so.” It was the only plausible explanation, despite how much Steve wanted to believe it was someone else, a fault in the machine. “Did you mean to kill me?”

His gaze flickered sideways, his throat working in tandem with the wary action. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I can’t remember—it’s just fragments. Pieces. People I don’t know and places I’ve never been to. I wake up and I feel like—” He stopped himself, hands systematically opening and closing into a fist.

Steve had to force himself not to say his name, to not call out to him—offer an outstretched hand across the abyss. “Do you remember me? At all?”

He shook his head, refusing to look at Steve—who grimaced, failing to hide his disappointment at the revelation. Steve had held onto the smallest glimmer of hope for so long—that even if Bucky couldn’t remember, he might be able to in due time—that hearing the truth felt like a psychical blow.

“I remember—” Bucky closed his mouth mid-sentence, mulling it over, droplets hanging suspended of the tips of his water-darkened hair. He finally looked up, his gaze meeting and _holding_ with Steve’s, like he was bracing himself for a fight—but he looks taken back. “Steve?”

“Yes?” he breathed.

“I can’t feel my fingers.”

Steve glanced down at his said appendages, sickly-pale and trembling. His knees were rubbery. The fractured line of pain which stretched across Bucky’s ribs had subsided with the promise of cold. He raised a hand to his numb lips. “S-Steve?”

“You’re going into hypothermic shock,” he stated, rising to his feet—he tried to mask the brief flicker of pain which crossed his own expression and failed. “We need to get you warm, find something sweet and hot to drink.”

Bucky tried speaking again, but to no avail.

“Help me,” a voice spoke, a metal hand reaching out to him.

Steve knew it was a test—that Bucky was daring him to forgo all pretences and accept that monstrous part of him. However, Steve had no chance but to take it, overcome with a rush of nausea as he stumbled to his knees. Steve’s fingers wrapped around his wrist, pulling it over his shoulders to support Bucky’s teetering weight. Bucky blinked, the harsh glare of fast-fading light on the snow momentarily blinding him as five alternative points of pressure rested on Bucky’s waist, holding him closer.

“Where are we going?” he asked, his head lolling forward in a puppet-like fashion.

“I know a place.”

Steve didn’t know how long they walked, it could’ve been hours, but it was more likely minutes. Once, he stopped, halting Bucky’s movements. His lungs were struggling to work. Even the serum running through his veins were ineffective in conserving body heat. He’d lost his coat in the fall, dressed in only pants, a singlet and a thermal long-sleeved T-shirt. His boots were more a hindrance than a benefit. Bucky was worse for wear—shaking and frail and so, so small, tucked safe against Steve’s side.

“I can’t do this,” he gasped out, realising just then how his chin rested on the top curve of Bucky’s head, fingers fumbling for a decent grip to hold him up, to keep him together.

“You c-can.” Bucky sounded—of all things—nonchalant.

“Why are you here?”

“I can a-ask you-u the same th-thing.”

“Bucky—”

“Don’t.”

Steve was struck by a sudden realisation, one he had much too often: “I should be dead.”

“So s-should I.”

It was a foxhole—from which war Steve didn’t know, but it was mentioned in one of the many files Steve had reread a million times over. It was a shallow hole, a few feet deep but wide enough to fit three grown men lying side-by-side, dirt heaped at the front. Steve released Bucky momentarily to push back the wooden foxhole cover, revealing the dry, snow-free sanctuary beneath. Bucky took one step, and then two, and then his legs were giving way. He didn’t hit the ground—Steve was manoeuvring him until his back was pressed against the earthen wall, booted feet touching the other side.

“Here,” Steve knelt down beside Bucky, digging through dark soil until his fingertips scraped the metal lid of an antique tool box. “The supplies should’ve kept—I might not be able to start a fire, but I can at least get you warm.”

He started making quick work of removing Bucky’s clothes—it may have been an overused trope in all inevitable love stories, but body heat was generated best by skin contact. And their clothes would take eons to dry without a fire to do so—Steve had tomorrow to worry about that.

“What are you doing?” Bucky asked, his voice quiet and questioning.

“Saving you, Buck.”

That was an opening—and Steve was glad Bucky didn’t take it.

Bucky’s ragged jacket was pulled tight over a faded red V-neck sweater. It was harder to strip Bucky of the jacket than the sweater, like the fastenings were not often undone. Steve tugged it off fiercely, handling Bucky like a child, moving his limbs where they needed to go. His boots, socks, and pants followed, until Bucky was in his briefs.

Steve paused—tentative fingers brushing his former best friend’s pallid cheek; an echo of when Steve had found him in Italy, shaking and disjointed—and then reached into the steel box to fish a blanket out. He pulled the blanket around Bucky’s shoulders, tucking it around the childlike position he’d curled into. His skin was clammy and cold to the touch, startlingly so—spurring Steve on to make quick work of his own clothes, stripping down to his briefs too.

Steve slipped in behind Bucky, pressing their bodies flush together, arranging the blanket to cover both of them. One arm acted as a support for Bucky’s head, and the other encircled his waist. He sucked in a gasp at how feeble and cold Bucky felt—like glass in his careful hold. Wet hair tickling his nose and his heartbeat quiet in his chest, Steve was a stiff line of tension behind Bucky’s prone form.

He ground his teeth together because Bucky was blue-lipped and _shivering_ and he hadn’t seen him in two fucking years. And now Steve was here, holding him close so he wouldn’t freeze to death in a forgotten German foxhole, a metal arm resting over his own.

He dared a glance at Bucky’s arm but quickly diverted his gaze away—a webbing of scars fissured from the jagged seam where skin met metal, a sign of pain and suffering from several different lifetimes. Steve swallowed, focusing on rubbing his arms over Bucky’s ice-cold skin, trying to stimulate a spark of warmth.

After a few seconds Steve succumbed to the rhythm of his hands, systematically moving over Bucky. He waited until Bucky’s heartbeat wasn’t a quiet tremor in his chest. He waited until his breath evened out, until it was a warm puff of air rather than a faint exhale. He waited until Bucky shifted in his embrace, his head turning—blinking owlishly—at Steve.

“Steve?” Bucky asked, strained but firm.

“Yeah.” He opened his mouth to say something else—exactly what he didn’t know—but Bucky beat him to it.

“Germany?”

“Yeah.”

“Foxhole?”

He shook his head, reining in the urge to bury his nose into the damp tendrils of Bucky’s hair. “Bucky,” he asked, slowly, “can you tell me what you remember?”

A muscle clenched in his jaw—the only hint of emotion he was willing to show.

“I had to ask, just once.” Steve said.

“You’re never going to stop asking,” he muttered harshly.

Steve shifted, now hyperaware of how close they were—the golden promise of warmth seeping back into his frozen limbs, slowly replaced cold with feeling. Bucky was lean and toned beneath him, a testament to the years he’d been honed into an efficient weapon. The thought sickened Steve, but he couldn’t ignore that part of Bucky’s life. If he had to do this Steve had to come to terms with everything he didn’t have the power to stop—starting with the fragmented shell of their former camaraderie.

“I—” Bucky tucked his chin against his collarbone, breathing deeply.

Steve looked at the sluggish drip of water through the gap in the wooden cover situated above them, ice particles filtering through. He told himself he wouldn’t hold Bucky tighter, he wouldn’t make this anything else more than a survivalist need—but Bucky inhaled sharply a few second later, almost as if Steve had let his mouth ghost over the back of his head like he so desperately wanted.

“I remember you,” Bucky said brokenly, lacking his usual note of indifference.

Steve strained not to move.

“I remember this—I remember how cold it would get.” He said, like admitting to a secret. “A rickety bed in our apartment. The way it looked with orange slants of streetlight shining through the window. How every time we did more than cough the bed would creak and groan—kept me up half the night.” His voice adopted an almost melancholic tone at the thought. Then, softer, serious: “And how small you were and how much it scared me when you were sick.”

He remained quiet before speaking, not wanting to shatter the fragile quiet. It was the first time in this ordeal Steve had felt like Bucky wasn’t guarding himself from an inevitable hurt. Like he was still waiting for it all to be cruelly ripped away from him. Like he didn’t trust himself to be vulnerable.

“Are you going to stay with me?”

Bucky’s reply was instant: “No.”

Steve knew this time he caved in—pressing his forehead to the back of Bucky’s head, his limbs shaking with something other than cold. He needed some form of reassurance that this wasn’t all a dream—that Bucky was real and whole and in his arms.

“Why can’t you?”

“I tried to kill you, Steve.”

“I know,” he said simply. “But it’s not like I ever expected this to be easy.”

Bucky shivered, grief tearing though him almost viciously.

“Bucky—”

“ _Don’t_.” He said, on the precarious verge of turning around and wrapping his metal fist around Steve’s neck. He wanted to squeeze, he wanted to make it _hurt_. He wanted to see the confusion in his eyes, the desperation, the disappointment—he wanted to know he felt everything Steve did tenfold.

“Please,” he whispered, “just don’t.

Steve allowed himself the small mercy of touch—wrapping his arms around Bucky tighter, even though they had surpassed the need to conserve warmth long ago. But it had been three months since Steve had willingly come into direct contact with anyone, and the last time Bucky had initiated _anything_ Steve had been kneeling on the sidewalk, barefoot and lost.

But he knew that both of them were already starting to feel the effects of their advanced healing abilities. Bucky didn’t need to stay here—he didn’t need Steve. He could leave whenever he saw fit. But it was cold and wet and this was the only time in the past two years Bucky had wanted to sleep rather than for the necessity of it.

“I’m begging you to stay, Buck.” Steve said, against all better judgment.

Silence, his chest rising and falling beneath Steve’s hand, and then: “I can’t promise you that.”

*

When Steve woke up the first thing he registered was the cold.

Bucky was gone.

*

Two days later, Steve jumped off the back of a truck and thanked the man who’d carried him there. He didn’t speak a word of English, but he recognised the name of Steve’s motel, and accepted his smile as payment for the ride. He jimmied the lock on his room and slipped inside, fishing a few euros from beside his bed to pay for a couple more nights here. Before he started to retrace Bucky’s steps he needed sustenance, and sleep. And a well-deserved shower.

An hour later, Steve stepped from the condensation-thick air of the small bathroom and crawled beneath his bedsheets with a sigh of bone-deep exhaustion. He may have pined for decent food and filtered water in his trek through the snow-thick mountain pass, but the marshmallow-soft mattress of his bed was something he could do without.

He didn’t regret sending Sam home, but he felt his absence most keenly at night. He had spent his entire life listening to someone sleep peacefully beside him, just used to another presence in the room. Now it was unearthly quiet, still, like a scene from a movie.

Even though Steve wanted nothing more than to sleep when he was huddled at the base of a pine tree yesterday, blowing hot air into the cup of his palms to keep warm, Steve couldn’t seem to get comfortable. He tossed and turned, sheets twisting around his legs, anxiety gnawing at his stomach. He didn’t want to admit to himself that he actually slept more soundly than he had in months with Bucky, and he was sure Bucky did too. It may have been a painful link to what once was, but it was all they had—so it was enough for Steve.

He was angry that Bucky had deserted him, of course. He was frustrated and sad and disappointed with himself for not convincing Bucky to stay, that Steve was doing this all so he didn’t need to suffer it alone, but his ruling emotion was loneliness.

It was the same all-consuming wave of crippling nausea that had slowly been eating away at him in D.C., and if not for Bucky he was sure he would’ve faded away soon enough. Without the familiarities of a home or people he needed to find a purpose in this life—and saving Bucky had been just that.

Sometime later, with Steve’s hand thrust under the pillow and his legs splayed across the bed, he heard the definitive _click_ of the window opening. He waited for it to shut, for Bucky to eventually retreat—but the sound didn’t come. Instead, the glass pane rattled gently in its frame and then a soft footfall soon followed, and another, the window sliding to a close.

Steve waited, thrumming with tension, praying that Bucky had placed enough trust in him to believe that this was a good thing—that relying on another person was normal and safe. His hand tightened in the sheets as the sounds slowed, softened. It was a muffled atmosphere. Quiet.

He turned, ensuring his movements were deliberate and visible. Mid-pivot, he heard Bucky startle—sharp and sudden. Steve froze, focusing on controlling his breathing. He stared at the ceiling for a few minutes, his limbs cramping at the strain of being held in the same position for so long, before daring to move again.

The lighting was dim, limited to watery lamplight that streamed in from outside. The lines and edges of Bucky’s stiff form were barely perceptible—unkempt hair, the dark shape of his jacket, a gleam of metal.

Steve could just make him out, his back pressed flush to the wall and knees childishly bought up to his chest. Vulnerable, but coiled with tension—ready to snap—like a length of cold wire.

It struck Steve how breakable Bucky seemed, a swell of emotion lodging in his throat.

“Were we lovers?” Bucky asked, abrupt in speech.

Steve blinked, pulled back a little. He didn’t expect—

“Were we lovers?” he repeated, lower, more serious.

Steve had loved Bucky since they were children, and when they were adults, and then again when they were nothing more than weapons and broken toy soldiers. He was able to bear the double dates, all the times Bucky stumbled into their tiny apartment with lipstick smudged on his collar and stinking of booze. Even in the army, when he happened across Bucky leaving a bunker and buttoning up his pants although the closest woman was thirty miles away, swallowing his anger as a strange man followed him out a few moments later. But he ignored it because it was war and it was hell, and dealing with the pang of loneliness was only the tip of the iceberg—Steve knew that.

Steve had been able to suffer in silence, for years, and then decades. Because he knew what he wanted to say would hurt and confuse Bucky, would weigh heavy upon him after Italy, so he kept his feelings buried and offered Peggy coy smiles and slid her picture into his pocket watch. And he let those feelings hurt him instead, let them fester.

But now, staring at the former shell of his best friend, he wondered if saying _yes, Buck, we were_ would fix seventy years of denied pain. Maybe it would help Bucky recover. Maybe it let him regain semblance of normality. But Steve knew it was the wrong thing to do—the mere thought of taking advantage of Bucky physically sickened him—and instead, he took the only option that he had left.

“No, Buck, we weren't.”

“But—” he stopped, words thick in his mouth.

“We were best friends, that’s probably what you’re feeling—”

“Don’t tell me how I feel.” It was threat, edging dangerously close to open hostility. “Don’t you even begin to tell me about how I feel. You have no idea. No fucking idea. I am not—” The cold sweat of fear and anger was palpable in the air. “I am not him.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, starting off the bed, but Bucky jerked to a stand the moment he had stated to move. “Please.” He was at the window in a second, fingers grasping desperately for the lock, frantic in his actions, breathing laboured. “Wait.”

Steve’s fingers grazed Bucky’s shoulder, slipping on the metal sheen, and then he was being violently shoved backwards. A gasp of some unnameable emotion—pain, fear, frustration?—followed. Steve regained his footing, spreading his legs to distribute his weight evenly. He looked up, recognising the half-crazed glint in Bucky’s eyes. His chest ached to help him, to soothe his pain and rabid fear. He reached out again and—

“Don’t touch me!” Both hands—metal and flesh—forced him backwards. Steve’s legs collided against the bed frame, tripping him, and Steve hit the ground hard. He didn’t remember the surprised cry that was torn from his throat, but he did remember the sound of gasp that was not his own—a whimper almost. His head swum with the haze of disorientation, the force of impact bruising.

Disorientated, he caught a glimpse of a strange figure with familiar movements slip out of the window.

Steve sat up, leaning far over his knees, groaning at the white-hot flare of anguish in his skull. He stared at the window hanging ajar, the wooden frame cracked under the imprint of desperate metal fingers.

Steve sighed deeply, more out of resignation and frustration than pain. He slipped down to the cold expanse of the floor, heels of his hands rubbing the leaden exhaustion which pulled at his eyelids. His chest hurt—an ache that was more emotional than physical.

He didn’t mean to scare Bucky, not even close to it, but he did. He tried to help and he just ended up making it worse. Steve wondered—hopelessly, fearfully—if Bucky would ever come back now, if he hadn’t fucked up the first chance he had to set things right in _two years_.

“Bucky,” he whispered to himself brokenly. “Bucky, I’m—”

Steve barely slept the night, and the mere sight of food the next day seemed to sicken him. Worry gnawed at his stomach, twisting his insides like a rope. Sometimes it caught up with him—this swelling of grief, working low in his abdomen all the way up to his throat, choking him. He didn’t leave his motel room out of the misplaced hope Bucky would return, and didn’t achieve much other than re-reading files he could almost quote now, the paper edges gone soft with use. Steve forced himself to make a cup of Joe to settle his nerves; and spent the remainder of the hour picking grits of cheap coffee grinds out of his teeth. He felt wrong, like his skin was pulled too tight over his body, distorting all feelings.

Steve retreated to his bed early, incapable of sleep. He tried closing his eyes, but his thoughts returned the Bucky. They always returned to Bucky—his gaunt, bedraggled frame being pulled from the river, the wet musk of his hair in the foxhole, the violent reaction he’d had to touch last night.

Exceedingly uncomfortable, Steve rolled over and made a mental note that whatever the situation was, Bucky had to initiate contact. It couldn’t be him, no matter how much he wanted it to be. It just couldn’t.

He didn’t plan on the window to slide open with a soft click sometime past midnight—not at all—but it wasn’t unwelcome. Steve held himself still, made himself a statue. He’d ensured his back was turned to the window before settling in bed.

In a repeat of the night before, he catalogued the noises—the window cracking opening, two feet finding purchase on the wooden floor, closing. The clothes scarped against the drywall, in small, fleeting motions, like Bucky was in a constant state of repositioning himself against the wall.

And so Steve waited. He clenched and unclenched his fist, focusing on the systematic motion of his hand, the bones and muscle moving beneath his skin. He fought with every last scrape of constraint he had in him not to turn around, to not quicken his breathing and arouse suspicion. Bucky quieted after a few minutes, his trained gaze weighing heavy on the back of Steve’s neck.

Who knew how the pair of them looked to the outside world—two hands reaching out in the darkness, Steve too scared to move and Bucky unable to understand why.

It felt like hours before either one of them dared moved, but Steve didn’t expect it not to be him.

The bed dipped imperceptibly under Bucky’s sudden weight, like he was hovering, a knee was resting on the knife’s edge of the mattress. And Steve tried to ease the ball of tension in his chest, but to no avail. He swallowed—the noise suddenly loud in the too-quiet room. He felt Bucky’s vague, unseen movements grind to a halt at the sound.

Steve turned his head into the pillow, willing with every fibre of his being for Bucky to stay with him. To trust him. A stuttered, broken _please_ may or may not have escaped him.

And, just like Bucky had heard him—and better yet, understood him—he complied. It unnerved Steve that Bucky almost needed confirmation to make decisions, but he pushed that thought on the back-burner for the moment. Right now he’d take whatever Bucky was able to give him without questions.

A cold breath of air brushed across Steve’s skin as the blankets lifted up, and then he felt another human body slip in next to his—not touching, hardly breathing, but still there. He didn’t feel any warmth radiating off Bucky, like he was in a perpetual state of coldness, but he chalked that up to the wintry bite of cold German nights. Steve wondered how Bucky survived outside for so long without adequate supplies, musing over what happened to him in the two years they’d been separated.

Bucky settled a few moments later, almost cutting his adjustment short abruptly. It was as if he didn’t know what he was doing, his movements stilted and his posture rigid—like he was worried making his own decisions would have damaging repercussions. He was positioned as far from Steve as possible on the mattress, at no risk of accidentally touching him. An inexplicable sadness rose in the back of Steve’s throat at the realisation Bucky didn’t feel safe around him.

In Brooklyn, when they were young, affection had passed easily and unsaid between them—arms hooked around shoulders, tipping chins up to assess split lips, sharing the same rickety bed when all other options were exhausted. Bucky would curl around Steve in an almost protective position, his nose brushing the smaller man’s neck. When Bucky fell asleep his hands rested by his sides, but they eventually wound around Steve’s waist during the night, one way or another. It didn’t matter because they were friends, and it was a private affair, but now?

Steve would’ve felt more comfortable on the floor if it didn’t feel like he sleeping on a sheet of ice here—Bucky seemed to lack the ability to retain warmth, despite the added measures of blankets and body heat.

Gathering his courage, Steve began to turn and—

Bucky stopped him, his metal arm shooting out to force his shoulder back onto the bed. “Don’t.”

 _At least it’s not a no_ , Steve thought to himself, trying to make light of the situation. But he knew, deep down in that hollowed-out place in his chest, that Bucky didn’t want Steve to look at him. Because he didn’t have a shred of understanding in regards to why he felt like this—overwhelmed, confused, _vulnerable_ —the moment he’d first glimpsed the blonde-headed man on the bridge, and all the moments after.

A remnant of a memory, recent enough for Bucky to discern, plagued his mind—the snap of a hand across his cheek, rubber between his teeth, the abrasive flood of electricity.

_But I knew him._

_I knew him—_

_I knew him—_

_I knew_ him _._

He didn’t know who he was, but he was neither the Winter Soldier or Bucky Barnes, and he had come to learn over the past two days that no matter what he had done over the course of his fractured, bleeding life, he had never slept as easily than he had in that dank foxhole. He was near-hypothermic, open to all manner of attack that his primary thought was to spin around and put Steve in a sleeper hold, and a hairline fracture in his ankle throbbed dully—but his eyelids had drifted shut without a single conscious thought.

“Night, Buck,” the man—the stranger—in front of him murmured.

He felt the sudden urge to reach out, like his body was reliving a memory he couldn’t quite place yet, but Bucky quelled the need to do so. He had come here so he could sleep for longer than twenty minutes snatches of time, but the more he told himself that, the more he felt that thread pulling again.

 _Sentiment_ —he sneered the word. It was a weakness. He did not think or feel without logic—and the presence of Steve Rogers did not inspire rational thought processes.

But, as the minutes—and later hours—trickled by in a steady passage of time, Bucky noticed—with a sort of sharp, sudden emotion that clawed at his throat—that he wasn’t cold anymore.

*

It happened every night from then on since. Steve didn’t expect Bucky to return, or even to make it past the threshold of the windowpane, but he had long forgone hope in regards to his former best friend. He didn’t question why or how—he didn’t dare risk the fragile agreement they had come to, or even the small measure of security Bucky had allowed him to have

It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Steve still woke up in heaving gasps, fingers skating desperately over the empty expanse of air beside him, but when he was able to calm down—deep breaths, Sam had always said, just focus on your breathing—Steve reminded himself at least he didn’t go to sleep alone anymore. He just awoke to a dull ache in his chest, the feeling growing sharper and more insistent as the days wore on.

Steve sat on the edge of his bed, running a hand over the thick graze of stubble which had grown along his jaw. His gaze was drawn to the window with a tired sort of resignation. He had tried to bear it—of finally being able to know Bucky was there, close, but not being able to doing anything about it—but two years had been a long time to wait. And he was sick of it.

The nights had fallen into a cycle of Bucky denying Steve everything—touch, sight, any semblance of trust—save for whispering a weak goodnight though cracked lips. Steve had tried going to bed earlier, when they sky blazed orange as the sun slipped below the horizon, but it didn’t make any difference. Bucky seemed to have estimated the period between when Steve pulled the covers tight beneath his chin and the window latch flicking open to almost exactly three hours. It had to be dark and shapeless when he entered the room, as if the shadows could be used to erase all physical signs of him.

Steve began ticking off the sounds in his head—the window latch would rattle, and the frame would be pushed open, followed by one foot, and then another. He tried to ignore how Bucky would keep the window open, like he needed the reassurance that he had access to an escape route.

The one variable in the whole pattern would be the length of time Bucky would take before joining Steve. Sometimes it wasn’t more than half an hour, others it was barely five minutes, but once or twice so far he had heard Bucky rest his back against the wall and rest there until Steve eventually succumbed to the lure of sleep.

But, the one aspect of the whole encounter Steve tried _every night_ to rectify was not being able to see Bucky. The violent aversion to contact was understandable, but being denied the simple right of looking at his friend? Steve could afford to withstand the long silences and painful lack of space between them—which damn near drove him insane—but not this. Not at all.

Steve tried—he really did—to do something usually when Bucky’s frantic breathing had slowed into the repeated in-and-out of a faint, damp warmth blooming over the back of his neck. He would shift his position first, alerting Bucky to his impending movement as he was still startled at the slightest noise, and begin to roll over.

But, again and again, the metal fist would clamp down over his upper arm, holding him in place.

Then, the brusque warning: “Don’t.”

And sometimes Steve would comply and return to his position, fighting the urge to chase the tingle of Bucky’s metal fingers on his skin. He’d clench his jaw and hold his position in a rigid stance, hating how much it physically _hurt_ not to turn over and end this farce once and for all.

And other nights he would resist and push against Bucky’s iron grip. “No, Buck, please,” he would say. He would plead, for the lack of a better word. “I need to see you—” The five metal points of contact on his arm would increase in pressure, digging into his flesh. “Bucky please—”

“Don’t!”

In a fast, remorseless twist of his arm, Bucky would grip Steve’s elbow tightly and angle his hand high in his back, pain searing through his muscles and tendons at the strain.

“Bucky,” his name would slip unbidden from his lips, a cry.

“I’m not him!”

“Please, let me see you—”

“I’m not him!”

Steve would wait a few moments longer, pondering what would happen if he persisted—Bucky would either kill him or be so frightened by his actions he would never return—and so he hung his head. Relaxed his body. Willed the small, pitiful voice in his head to quiet.

“Okay,” he said, sadly, “okay, I won’t do it again.”

A white-hot flash of pain—a reminder of the power Bucky currently thought he held over Steve.

“I won’t do it, I promise.”

Bucky would release Steve eventually, and retreat so far across the bed it was a wonder he didn’t fall off the edge. How had it had come to this? Bucky had been at Steve’s side from the beginning—when his grin was full and easy in Brooklyn, after Italy when it was grim and fleeting, and then when he wasn’t even there to smile anymore.

After that, Steve would tell himself that he had to stay awake. Like clockwork, Bucky would disappear at the slightest hint of sunlight, but he’d return under the shroud of darkness. So he had to wait, he just had to wait. But Bucky managed to slip from the sheets without waking Steve—the faint titter of birds still roused Bucky awake—and just blink out of his existence without disturbance.

Steve thought he maybe could convince Bucky to stay, that being able to face him in something other than minimal light and actually _see_ him would make him realise that he could stay. That he would know that Steve would lay everything down to help him. But, as defeat slowly gnawed at his stomach like a parasite, the blackness would roll in, and Steve would fall prey to the restful lull of sleep.

The early mornings still remained a surreal awakening to the modern era, words at the tip of his tongue and bright images flashing across his brain. Sometimes Steve wondered why he wasn’t small anymore, sharing the bedspace with Bucky’s in their dinghy little Brooklyn apartment, and other times he still expected ice particles to frame his fluttering eyelashes, the cold having seeped into his bones for decades past.

Now it was like living with a phantom, a nightmare—a memory that was blurred and faded at the corners, but a memory nonetheless. It was a voice with no corporeal form—a body without a personality. The bathroom wall still bore evidence of Steve’s frustrated anger, his fist lashing out to hit something real and solid—because he had Bucky, but yet he didn’t. He had the broken shell with nothing inside. But what drove the nail through the coffin was the fact that Bucky wouldn’t let Steve be anything more than a promise of a warm body.

In the present, Steve glanced downwards at the file in his quivering hands. Then, with a respectful care for retaining the quality of the worn pages, he opened the file like he’d done so many times before.

But it was Bucky’s pictures that stopped him—one in uniform and the other tinged blue, frozen.

His insides coiling, twisting, Steve closed the file and made himself a promise.

The window was ajar, a symbol some misplaced sort of hope. He focused on how the air was warmer now; spring slowly having replaced the marrow-deep chill of winter. Steve let the outside sounds wash over him for a second before standing up and retreating to the bathroom.

It was cleaner than his previous rooms, the atmosphere brighter than the dim shadows of a German foxhole or a standard, squalid motel just off the main highway. Steve had made the effort to move a few times, because Bucky never seemed calm staying in one place for too long—he’d stop trying to sleep in bed, disappearing much too soon without warning.

Steve favoured the western countries of Europe over the east, avoiding Switzerland entirely and instead settling in northern France, near the border. It was far from the turmoil and sharp-edged memories of snow and blood and wind, so Steve stayed. Bucky always managed to find him the night afterwards—Steve ensured his room always on the ground floor and had an accessible window.

He prepared for bed, following a doctrine of brushing his teeth, combing his hair, and changing into flannel pyjama pants and a soft blue T-shirt. Steve stared at the bed as the floor beneath him alternated from tiles to carpet, and he was momentarily struck at how later that night Bucky would be there with him. He was never sure if he slept for more than a handful of broken intervals a night, but knowing Bucky was there momentarily soothed over whatever troubles plagued him.

The sheets were a little rough from regimented starching, but it was still unbearably comfortable—although it had become easier to adjust with time. Steve settled with his arm jammed beneath the pillow and his other tucked close to his chest, positioned on his side as usual. And he closed his eyes, and waited.

Steve awoke—really, he was surprised he’d even fallen asleep—as the mattress dipped, alerting him to Bucky’s approach. Groggily, he murmured something his sleep-addled brain couldn’t quite yet commit to memory, stretching out to pop the stiff joints of his shoulders. Steve swore he heard a huff of air behind him—a not-quite breath of laughter.

He allowed himself to smile—the action foreign and tight across his features—but he didn’t turn over. Bucky seemed to lose whatever too-relaxed ease he’d gained in the small moment of human emotion. It was almost like he expected Steve to turn over, that by opposing the norm of their nightly ritual Bucky was affected in a way he couldn’t quite yet explain—his chest tightening in a keen ache, metal fingers empty of the smooth, toned flesh of Steve’s arm.

Bucky settled, legs drawn close to his body and hands pillowed beneath his head. He slept like he needed to conserve body heat, but the cold was always there—he was always trapped in a coffin that was made out of metal rather wood, waking up with parched lips and blank slate where his mind should’ve been.

But Steve—

Steve made him forget. He radiated with warmth, like he embodied everything Bucky needed—only he was too scared to touch. Because he had watched blood pool beneath his fingers, necks bending and snapping at odd shapes, limbs and fingers torn apart beneath the lethal glide of his hands. His touch was meant to break, not repair. And Steve didn’t deserve to bear Bucky’s pain as his own—not now.

So then why did it feel as if, every time he gritted his teeth and slipped from Steve’s bed in the dim glow of morning, he was losing another fragment he had grappled so hard for to find?

Bucky allowed himself to sigh, a little harsher and louder than usual, his metal arm stretched out like it was in the process of reaching for Steve. He stared at the silver gleam of his hand a momeant longer, and then the fine blond hairs at the nape of Steve’s neck only a short distance from him, before reverting to what he knew rather than what he wanted. His fingers were startlingly cold beneath his chin, more so than usual.

Steve shifted in his sleep once more, achingly familiar in his movements although Bucky couldn’t recall a time or place at seeing him move like that. Suddenly, it had become evident that the sheets served no purpose in staving off the chill of the night air, and Bucky was cold once more. Even now, he was still unable to unthaw.

During the night, Steve angled his head to the side as if he was meaning to turn over and look at Bucky like he had done every night before. Bucky tensed at the action. He watched with rapt attention, the very breath stolen from his lungs as he desperately waited. He wanted Steve to defy him, to force him to act out or to gruffly voice his complaint. And he even dared to speak aloud, opening his mouth to do so.

And Steve shut his eyes, willing Bucky to initiate something—anything—other than the knife-sharp press of his fingers and a callous refusal to accept any form of help.

But Steve didn’t roll over, and Bucky didn’t say a word.

He lay there for the remainder of the night, feeling nothing but the cold.

Sleep was a difficult thing for both of them to find.

But as the balance of good and bad finally tipped in Steve’s favour, a few scattered hours without rest was child’s play compared to two years of searching—of the concerned phone calls he never received and Sam’s pitiful looks and the taunting glimpse of Bucky in his peripheral vision—because he would’ve waited a thousand years for what came next.

Forever restless, Steve had fought the frustration lodged in his chest, and the grating burn of tiredness in eyes. In his sleep, he turned onto his back in an involuntarily move to settle, and the redistribution of weight caused Bucky to roll towards his centre of the gravity—the middle of the mattress. Steve had been a soldier, used to waking up at the crack of dawn and slipping into the waiting abyss as at a moment’s notice, so the sudden press of cold metal across his abdomen shocked him out of his fragile sleep.

Bucky shifted, his nose pressed to the space between Steve’s neck and shoulder. He inhaled sharply through his nostrils, telling himself that he shouldn’t look at Bucky, he shouldn’t—

But, as his gaze slipped from the ceiling above to the man beside him, it was worth it. It was worth more than seventy years of loss and grief and denial to see Bucky sleeping beside him, his face softened with sleep and eyelashes framed against his cheek. He slept fully dressed, the fabric dirty with months of unwashed sweat and grime, and now Steve realised just how much Bucky needed a decent shower. And hidden beneath his clothes was the evidence of his hunger, his once-lean body sharp and gaunt with hunger.

“Bucky,” Steve whispered, his voice almost pained.

But he realised his mistake the moment it passed through his lips, and Bucky’s eyes snapped open. The ring of blue was almost non-existent surrounding his large pupils. He recognised the few singular emotions swirling in his gaze—fear, most of all.

Steve knew that Bucky would scramble across the bed, away from him, and he would more than likely never return. And he couldn’t wait forever—if he did Bucky would just be skirting at the edge of something profound and unnameable, loitering at cusp of reaching forward or saying more than a pointed _don’t_. So, as he felt Bucky begin to pull away Steve lunged forward, awaiting the pressure that would inevitably close around his neck, but he persisted.

As his arms encircled Bucky’s torso, the force of Steve’s body pushed him down against the bed in an attempt to hold him place for more than two seconds. If he could just—

But Bucky pushed against him, lashing out with a red-tinged violence—kicking, fingernails drawing blood over his cheeks, a knee thrust to the stomach—in an attempt to escape the sudden closeness of Steve. It was warmth and it was fear and it was all so much that he had to fight it, he had to run away.

“Bucky!” Steve’s voice was distant, desperate.

Bucky pushed and pushed and pushed, a vice tightening around his chest the longer Steve held on.

“Please, Bucky!”

He wasn’t him, he wasn’t him, he wasn’t—

“It’s just me, okay? It’s just Steve,” he was pleading now, loud and unashamedly. To whom he was talking to who Bucky didn’t know. “It’s just me, see that please. It’s me. It’s Steve.”

But the door was sliding shut, ice running clear and cold through his veins, the sweat and moisture freezing on his skin and inside his mouth. And then he was falling, wind whistling in his ears and his arm outstretched, calling out for a man he didn’t know. It was hidden smiles and stolen looks in the dark, wanting something he barely understood but aching for it anyway.

A train—

A bridge—

A river.

“Bucky, it’s me, it’s—”

“Steve?”

And just like that, a switch flipped in his head. He no longer clawed at a chance to escape, fighting for the sake of fighting. Because he was with Steve and he was warm and it had been years—decades—since anyone had touched him without the intention to maim. It hurt, the wrongness of it all threatening to split his skull, but it was the only thing he had done in two years that made any sort of plausible sense to him. It was a simple want, a base need, that didn’t require a thought to why.

Steve began to pull away, thinking that if he stayed any longer Bucky would lapse into his frantic state, but he was stopped at the feeling of fingers wrapping around his elbow.

“Don’t,” Bucky said, a tenuous string barely holding him together. “Please, Steve. Don’t.”

The look in Steve’s eyes—hopeful, heartfelt, and tragically vulnerable—caused another piece of him to slot back into its rightful place. It was Coney Island and wanting to kiss him with cotton-sticky lips, a whorl of bright colour and light surrounding him. It was pretending not to look as Steve changed into civvies in his mud-splattered tent during the war, catching his eye and smirking as if to say _you’ll have to beat the girls off with a stick, Steve_ even though the mere thought curdled his stomach. It was wanting to have kissed him just once before they rappelled onto that fast-moving train in the snowy mountains— _just once_.

But whatever he felt, it could wait.

“Buck?” Steve prompted gently.

He shook his head. “Just don’t. Please.”

Whatever he was trying to say, Steve seemed to understand. He started to roll onto his back and then—Bucky was making a questioning noise in the back of his throat, almost whimpering at the loss of contact, because no, no, no—Steve couldn’t leave him, not yet—

“It’s okay.” It was soothing, quiet.

“Steve?” He asked, almost child-like in speech.

“You’re okay, you’re with me.”

Bucky looked sceptical, so Steve offered him a weak smile. He tugged Bucky gently to him, sucking in a shaky gasp as cold metal slid over the thin fabric which covered his stomach and a hesitant leg nudged his, cold lips against his neck. It seemed Steve had been waiting a millennia for this moment, as the ice finally cracked, effectively signalling the end to whatever cold front that had been erected between then.

For some reason, some thread of old doctrine that had been instilled within him, Bucky held himself stiff in Steve’s arms. But he was warm—so warm, enveloped in the heat of a furnace. He was close and safe, but yet he still waited for the blow—the pain, the rejection. Never had he been able to ask or feel or think without consequence.

“Steve?” The sound on his tongue was rough and new, in need of thought to understand, but the person was not. In an echo of their conversation in the foxhole, cold and unfamiliar but subject to that undeniable pull, Bucky asked: “Are you going to stay?”

A brush of a mouth over the top of his head, placating. “As long as you’ll let me, Buck.”

And maybe that was all he needed.

*

The morning after was a cold affair, Steve looking to the empty half of his bed like he almost didn’t expect Bucky to have left. The ache was still there, a perpetual hurt which threatened to overwhelm him in its intensity sometimes, but it was less visceral now, less raw. Because he didn’t wake up with the remnant of want and frustration coursing though, instead it was the memory of metal pressed to his skin and the hot in-and-out of breath on his neck.

Because he was getting Bucky back, piece by piece, inch by inch.

Steve could barely sit still the fowling day, having ruminated over the night before without relent—and he wondered what was to come. After a lengthy run through the countryside, persisting until even his lungs burned and his legs had turned to rubber, he’d returned to a quick shower, a fleeting meal, and tedious paperwork. He even considered calling Sam, but thought the better of it.

He was thrumming with nervousness as Bucky pushed the window open that night, slipping inside. Steve sat up in bed at his entrance, resting his weight on his palms. He couldn’t explain it, but being able to actually look at Bucky made his throat close, and his tongue flick out to wet his lips. It was an old feeling, unfurling in his stomach after laying dormant for years—Steve blinked at the sudden rush of it, a strong heat flushing low in his abdomen.

Bucky straightened, finally turning to look at Steve. His silhouette was held loosely, more relaxed and natural than his usual soldier-like stance. He advanced forward a step before halting, almost as if he was unsure of his actions.

Steve concentrated on breathing through his nose, straining at the urge to reach for Bucky. “C’mere,” he said, just like he used to do when Bucky had stumbled home blind-drunk, or when the winter air was frigid with cold whenever he’d spent the past few hours working outside.

Slowly, his face shrouded in darkness but no less intense, Bucky started to remove his jacket, pants and boots. He’d been sleeping in full kit for a few weeks now, stiff and grime-streaked, so it was a welcome change from the norm. In a trance-like state, Steve pulled his own shirt over his head. Bucky seemed to respond well to touch now, so Steve concluded it seemed like the best choice to offer skin contact. He told himself that he wasn’t doing this for his own benefit, and he almost believed it too.

Bucky pulled the sheets back and crawled into bed beside Steve like he’d been waiting all day to do just that—yet Steve didn’t want anything more in this world then to lean over and kiss him. The atmosphere felt practically volatile, an underlying current of electricity that Steve felt skate along his skin, vibrating in his fingertips.

He and Bucky sat together on that bed, shoulders almost brushing. The shapes and curves and lines of each other were blurred with darkness, the dim silhouette of a metal arm more malevolent than comforting. It whirred and clicked with movement, reaching out as if to touch Steve’s cheek, but retreating in an aborted movement.

Ignoring the raw ache in his chest at the uncertainty, at the lack of trust in, the corner of Steve’s mouth was downturned. But he felt the warm breath of air bloom over his lips, alerting him to how near Bucky was to him. Steve felt himself incline forward, chin dipping and cocked to the side.

And there it was, the ghost of lips over his, not there but oh so close.

But when Bucky tipped his head to the side in a long-ago echo of another him in an alleyway, grinning down at a much smaller Steve, he realised that his face was devoid of a smile. Yes, something like naked attraction and sincerity swirled in his gaze, but it wasn’t Bucky. It wasn’t the confident, practised ease of Sergeant James Barnes, or his once-friend dressed in a blue military coat and his tongue cynical rather than teasing—this was a shell of a man who was terrified of his feelings. He was a fragment of all his past selves—a child with no memory yet he awoke with scarlet blood dripping off metal fingers.

Steve couldn’t take advantage of someone who didn’t even know he was, let alone understand what he was feeling or what Steve meant to him.

However, Bucky seemed to lean forward slightly, hair brushing the curve of his cheek. Gritting his teeth in restraint, Steve stopped him with a hand to his chest. He flinched at the touch and almost tried to pull back. Steve frowned at his reaction and reluctantly withdrew his hand, only it seemed to worse the situation. The air grew cold, tense. Whatever good that had begun to pitifully spark inside Steve withered and faded, the mere memory of it souring. Bucky reeled back, blinking furiously in the shadowed light as if he was confused.

“Bucky—”

“Don’t.”

Steve gritted his teeth, slowly coming to hate that word, that simple rebuttal. He watched as Buck turned away from him and lay back against the bed, the gap of space between them speaking magnitudes. Anger, and a weary frustration, coursed through him, alighted in his veins.

He wanted to fight and scream and push for a response he could make sense of, but Bucky didn’t need someone who could bend his will. He didn’t need orders and harsh criticism. He needed someone who would accept everything that happened to him without fault, he needed patience and understanding and unwavering loyalty.

Only Steve was beginning to think that maybe that person wasn’t him.

He followed suit, resting his head on the pillow, mirroring Bucky’s position as they both stared at the ceiling above. Steve pinched the bridge of his nose once, twice, as Bucky remained stock-still, a statue of tension and indifference rather than a living and breathing person. As always, Steve itched to reach out and touch and soothe, but the timing was wrong— _would it ever be right?_

An hour passed, or maybe it was two, and then Steve began to notice Bucky relaxing. The rigid tautness drained from his frame, his limbs resting more heavily on the sheets, eyelids intermittently fluttering shut in fatigue. Swallowing the lump of fear and pride that had lodged in his throat, Steve rolled over.

Bucky stared at him, hostility brimming in his eyes. Maybe he had lapsed into his Winter Soldier-mindset, where he thought in clinical terms and logistics, but maybe he was hurt and angry like Steve too. But, that hell-fire in his eyes subsided, returning to its normal shade of blue. Recognising Bucky’s silent permission, Steve advanced further and urged Bucky gently onto his side, curling his larger, warmer body over his smaller, paler, scarred one.

Maybe things would be set to rights one day, but Steve knew it as a long way coming. But right now, folded against Bucky and his thick, greasy hair tickling his nose, the smell of unwashed skin almost pungent enough to make his eyes water, Steve allowed himself to believe.

Their pattern was easier to follow now, if every scrap of progress was hard-won. The majority included Bucky slipping out of bed before sunrise, leaving Steve to grasp for him blindly upon waking up. But, during the rare mornings-after Steve would rouse with his hand resting over too-cool skin, Bucky’s head cradled in the crook of his shoulder.

They usually fell asleep with Steve spooning Bucky, protecting him from all harm to make up for all the times he didn’t, but Bucky always held onto Steve like an anchor in a storm in the end. It grounded him, kept him tether to the only thing in this world that didn’t inflict pain or a flash of incoherent images and words.

Steve felt like he had to fight tooth and nail to elicit a proper reaction from Bucky without damaging him further. He alternated between a Bucky with a vacant expression with a heartbreakingly blank stare, with pale scars marking his body and a hole where he knew his heart should’ve been—and a Bucky who was almost child-like in manner, who called out for Steve in a tenuous, shaking voice.

But Bucky had moments of lucidity, when the smallest ray of sunlight broke through the cloud cover and he wasn’t a shadow or a stranger with a cruel stare and empty eyes. He would talk in full, coherent sentences instead of the smallest inclinations of his head or the grip of his knuckles growing increasingly white with tension. His memories were more tangible—the realisation dawning in his eyes as he stared at the chipped rim of a coffee pot or an image of what once had been his home. He usually reacted violently to his recollection of a past life, but it was repressed for Steve’s benefit.

Bucky was trying, he really was, and sometimes Steve just had to focus on that. No matter how much it hurt him, or caused him to retreat to the corner of Steve’s bedroom curled in on himself, he tried to regain everything he had lost.

It was push and pull—one step forward, two steps back.

Touch seemed to soothe Bucky, keep him grounded, so Steve made an effort to use that as a coping mechanism. He always approached Bucky from the front, never from the back—his collarbone was still bruised black and blue from the first time he tried that. Steve learnt where to touch—face, shoulders, waist, chest, legs—and where not to touch—neck, arms, hands, feet. He couldn’t feel trapped or like he could be controlled. But Bucky was allowed to touch Steve—he made sure of that after the second night, and soon Bucky stopped waiting for a reassuring smile or nod.

Maybe that’s what made the days pass so easy—the brief, unhurried grazes of Bucky’s fingers over Steve, tracing the circle of his wrists or the hard curve of his jaw with a determined focus. It was like he was relearning the shape of Steve, trying to find the places he fit into the jagged puzzle of his mind. Steve never refused him, never did more than offer Bucky a golden smile whenever his fingertips stilled with uncertainty.

It was laden with unspoken confessions, an omnipresent sadness and an undercurrent of something that was keenly felt but not fully acknowledged—reaching for something to hold onto but coming away empty-handed, every single time. It didn’t feel real, more like a dreamland that Steve feared he’d imagined in his depressive stupor. He’d come to the conclusion that hope was a dangerous thing, but Steve was grateful for a second chance—no matter what the circumstances.

But their fragile relationship balanced the good and the bad—the bad being Bucky’s nightmares.

It came to a head one night—like a bomb that had been ticking ominously for far too long.

Bucky had been screaming, fighting, speaking in rapid-fire Russian. It usually begun like this, unconscious movements in the dark, trapped in the prison of his own mind. His voice was guttural at first, and then it would grow frightened, and then loud. It alternated between systematic barks and whimpers, cries and orders, like the further his nightmares went on the more he was stripped of all his prior defences. Steve’s hands closed around his arms—a wrong move he realised too late. A metal fist pummelled Steve’s chest so hard he was sure a rib cracked, but his attention was focused on Bucky.

_Always on Bucky._

Bucky came to with a jerk of his head, brandishing a knife from God-knows-where.

“Buck, hey, it’s me,” Steve said, just trying to fill the air with something that wasn’t his laboured panting. The blade was trembling in his grip, quavering. Bucky was crouched on the end of his bed, Steve on his knees at the other end, staring at him with sleep-mused hair and a downturned mouth.

“It’s Steve,” he repeated.

He faltered, the cold mask of indifference slipping.

With a careful slowness, Steve edged closer to Bucky, making a placating gesture with outstretched hands. That fear returned, that rabid sneer of a terrified animal, but whatever was controlling him was losing steam. He was coming back to himself, painfully slow.

Bucky swiped, and Steve dodged. With a seamless grace, he straightened Bucky’s arm and drove his palm into his elbow, registering a crack of bone. With a cry of pain, the knife clattered to the floor. After a moment’s lapse Bucky dove for it and Steve followed, tackling him on the ground.

As Bucky turned in Steve’s arm, snarling viciously, he acted on instinct—reflex. Bucky watched with abject horror as Steve stared down at him, begging him to please, please stop, but he did it anyway. The knife was thrust upwards, aimed at Steve— _at Steve_.

It was then Bucky realised what he’d done—the moment the blade had cut through skin and flesh and muscle. He was gasping, a heartbeat ponding in his ears—his heartbeat, the sound of his own fear. He was scared. He was guilty. He was—

Bucky had attacked Steve, he’d hurt Steve.

His fingers slipped from the knife’s hilt, grasping aimlessly at Steve’s shirt, his face.

“No, I didn’t mean to, Steve, no, no—” he gasped out, choking. “Steve, please be all right. Steve. _Steve_. I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry—” Steve’s shirt darkened with the stain of blood, his fingers painted red. Whatever he’d done in the seventy years prior didn’t compare to this now, not when it was Steve. “No, please God, no—”

Steve leaned back onto his knees, gasping under his breath as he assessed the swipe across his chest. He grasped for Bucky, wanting to hold him close—but his presence had lost it solidity, he had become more vaporous than tangible. Ignoring the pang of his absence, Steve instead focused on determining the extent of his injury. He pulled his shirt up to reveal a shallow laceration, barely even an inch deep. Steve pressed his hand over the wound firmly, gathering fabric close to the split seam, trying to stem the steady flow of blood.

He looked up as an afterthought—and suddenly an open wound was the last of his problems. Bucky was sitting against the wall with his knees pressed to his chest, his fingers gripping the roots of his hair tight, like he was trying to substitute pain for whatever inner turmoil he was experiencing.

“Bucky?”

He didn’t move, and the lack of response unsettled Steve.

“Bucky, please.” Steve noticed he seemed to be doing a whole lot of begging tonight. Steve crawled closer to Bucky, refusing to wince inwardly at the throbbing pain of his wound. “Look at me.” He stopped at his feet, unsure of whether or not to breach his personal space so soon.

Bucky whimpered softly, fingers mercilessly scratching the surface of his skull.

“Hey, can you look at me? Can you do that?”

Bucky did as he was bid, and it almost killed Steve. His gaze was haunted, vacant—a shadow of his former emotion. Bucky glanced at the hand pressed over Steve’s chest, and then at the blood which streaked his silver fingers in stark red, his mouth twisting bitterly. He curled in on himself, arms wrapped around his torso.

“I hurt you,” Bucky said, his voice raw.

“It’ll heal in a few weeks, days even.”

“ _But I hurt you_.”

Frowning, Steve reached for Bucky as if to offer him some form of comfort, but at the sharp shake of his head his touch retreated. These moments hurt most of all—when Bucky needed something desperately, with every fibre of his being screaming out for it, yet he didn’t think he was allowed it.

“You can’t keep making excuses for me,” Bucky argued hoarsely, resting his head back against the wall. He stared through the window outside resignedly, blankly. “I’m never going to be who you want me to be.”

“Buck,” Steve whispered, “I don’t care about that.”

“You do.”

“I don’t—”

“You look at me like you’re waiting for _him,_ like I’m just a fill-in until the real Bucky comes home.” It was a scathing response, quick and cutthroat. Steve flinched at the truth in his statement, but he’d come to terms with him and Bucky a long time ago. He was settling for whatever— _whoever_ —he got.

“But you are the real Bucky,” Steve argued weakly, “I don’t know why you can’t see that.”

His head dropped at his words, hair brushing his shoulders. “The real Bucky wouldn’t have hurt you.”

Steve sighed deeply.

“It doesn’t matter, Buck,” he said simply, noticing how his words caused Bucky to tense, frozen in place. Steve rushed to clarify, “Because I’ve known and loved and lost so many Bucky’s that I’d be happy for just one.” He smiled, short but bright. Reassuring. “I want you, no one else.”

Bucky’s head snapped up, pinning him to place. “Don’t,” he whispered shakily. “ _Don’t._ ”

“I’ll do whatever you want, just tell me.”

His lips formed a hushed sentence Steve didn’t catch, his gaze heated and dark, but Bucky shook his head as if to dispel the thought as quickly as it had come. “Just—” he grappled for the right words, “stay with me.”

A crease deepened between Steve’s eyebrows as he pondered asking what Bucky’s first request had been, but it was hardly a time to be pushing him. He pressed harder against his chest, focusing on the pain to keep his thoughts centred.

“Sure, Buck,” he said with a forced cheer, “whatever you want.”

Steve leaned back against the edge of the wooden bed frame, settling in for a long night with his legs outstretched. The wound was slowly losing its sting, but he kept his bunched-up shirt pressed to it for the sake of appearances. He glanced at Bucky once more, recognising the much too familiar glint of despondent guilt in his eyes, and offered a watery smile in return.

Bucky’s jaw tightened, his resolve hardening as he tried to erase the memories of different time, where his hands fluttered over Steve’s split lip and bloodied knuckles, frail shoulders fitting perfectly in the curve of his palm. His metal arm whirred and clicked as he clenched his hand, willing the blurred images to banish from his mind but never fully releasing the only shards of good that still retained.

And, even as they spent their first night ripped apart instead of wound close together, Steve waited until Bucky was able to make his way home.

*

Following Steve’s nosedive into an icy German river, his diet was limited to gritty coffee and takeout food whenever Bucky decided to stay night. He didn’t dare forgo that small glimmer of time he could spend with Bucky during the day, when he was bathed in the warm glow of light rather than shrouded in the dark. It also sent a spike of guilt and anger through Steve whenever he ate something full and hearty and good, because Bucky couldn’t stomach more than baby food and blended protein shakes.

He’d discovered Bucky had never been properly fed or washed with anything other than a pressure hose when he was the Winter Soldier. Steve never asked, but he concluded that in between short bouts where Bucky had been woken from cryostasis to complete a mission, he didn’t stop to eat or sleep—he didn’t know how. That integral ability to read human signals was stripped from him. He was rendered an object to them, and the mere thought of it curdled Steve’s stomach and soured his appetite.

And so, Steve purchased baby food in bulk and ensured he always had a glass of water nearby as if to remind Bucky to drink. Bitter, black coffee seemed to go down well and sometimes thin slices of bread and maybe even a spread of butter, so Bucky stuck to what he knew and made do.

In the daylight, his flaws were all the more clearer—dark hair hanging in perpetually greasy hunks, clothes rumpled and unwashed, the gaunt lines of his body exposed. He was steadily gaining more weight, and on rare occasions he’d return with a freshly-pink face, as if he’d spared a few minutes to vigorously rub it clean. No matter how dishevelled Bucky looked illuminated in the light, Steve ached to see the blue of Bucky’s eyes, and the way his fingers curled around the mug of coffee, or leaning against the kitchen counter almost causally. He had the same movements of all the men before him, matching in gestures and almost-smiles, so familiar that Steve couldn’t bear to look.

Despite his nutritional misgivings, Steve had made the effort to cook a real breakfast one day. He’d laid out a full spread—bacon, eggs, toast, tomatoes, beans, mushrooms, sausages, orange juice and coffee that wasn’t vacuum-sealed in a pocket-sized silvery packet—before as Bucky had laid in bed, awake but unwilling to leave the warmth of the early morning light.

It didn’t escape Steve that Bucky avoided dark, cold places at all costs—and so he’d also ensured the curtains were always pulled back from the windows to allow the full extent of light to stream through.

Bucky wandered in sometime after, sitting across Steve at the small, kitchen table. He wore a grimy grey-coloured singlet and khakis, barefoot and relaxed. He stared at Steve, absorbed in his actions—Steve tried not to do the same and instead nudged his foot with Bucky’s lightly. The corner of his mouth quirked in an amused half-smile, and so Steve counted it as a win.

It was one of his good days.

After Steve had made his way through more than half of his meal he was alerted to the sound of Bucky tentatively pulling the plate of bacon closer to him. He watched, transfixed, as Bucky picked up a rasher of bacon and regarded it curiously. He looked to Steve for permission, to ensure he was doing the right thing, and he nodded in support.

Bucky opened his mouth and his teeth closed around the crackled flesh, chewing it thoughtfully. A golden swell of emotion built in Steve’s chest, overwhelming him in its intensity. It had been weeks—months even—before he’d felt something so inherently good that wasn’t instantly repressed or hidden for his or Bucky’s sake. His grin threatened to split his face in half, practically emanating with happiness.

“Taste good?” he prompted, startling at how light his voice sounded.

Bucky nodded, surprising them both with his fervour. “Yeah, it does.”

The moment wasn’t laden with seventy years’ worth of untold physical and emotional trauma, on the knife’s edge of destroying them both, instead it was bright and sun-warmed and content. For a moment, fate had allowed Steve and Bucky to share a moment that was _easy_.

But, like all good things, it was short-lived.

In a nearby street a car backfired, a short burst of sound that broke the carefully constructed peace of the motel room. Steve barely had time to react before the table tipped violently to the side, a streak of brown hair and a body much smaller than his crashing into him, inertia throwing him backwards. The chair hit the ground hard, wood splintering with the considerable force it strained under. Steve sprawled out on the floor and groaned as the wind was knocked out of him, stealing his breath for a moment. A sturdy weight pinned him to the ground, arms locked around his torso almost desperately.

Bucky—

He’d knocked him to the ground. The sound reminded him of the crack of a gunshot, of a man arranged on the top of a building with his finger poised over a trigger, waiting for the right moment to strike. Bucky realised with a start that this was all his fault—he’d made Steve keep the windows unobstructed, he’d left them open to all forms of attack.

Bucky had affiliated the sound with imminent danger—and the first he had done was protect Steve.

“Steve?” He was saying, his plea strangled and raw. “Steve? _Steve_?” It was a question this time, a cry to whatever power dictated their lives, asking—praying—that Steve was okay. That he was still whole.

“Bucky,” Steve whispered, hands coming to rest on his back in reassurance.

Rising on his elbows, Bucky was saying Steve’s name over and over again. He was so scared that Steve wasn’t really there, that this was all a farce constructed to break him. His hands—both metal and flesh—flitted over Steve’s face, his chest, abdomen, legs, frantically searching for any sings of damage. He couldn’t be dead, not now, not when his own thoughts were no longer shards of glass, not when he touched Steve and didn’t feel the overpowering need to hurt him, not when he—

“Bucky, Bucky, look at me,” Steve was repeating, trying to incite Bucky from his distressed state, “it’s Steve. I’m here, you’re okay. I’m here. You’re with me.” He sat up, holding Bucky against him, one hand cradling the back of his head whilst the other was pressed firmly between his shoulders. “Stay with me, don’t leave. I’m here.”

“Steve.” Bucky choked out once more, hands grasping futilely at Steve’s shirt. “ _Please_ —”

“I’m here, it’s okay.”

His response was sharp, quiet: “It’s not.”

Steve quieted, unable to offer him anything but the truth. He couldn’t lie to Bucky, but he knew whatever they had it was based on paper-thin mutual trust and numerous external factors. He could never seem to rely on motel rooms absent of personal affects, with crackling wallpaper and sparse furniture, to repair the damage done to Bucky’s mind. Steve was never comfortable in beds that made too much noise and strained under his and Bucky’s conjoined weight.

But, most of all, he wanted to fall asleep to the earthy sounds of Brooklyn enveloping him.

“I want to go home,” Bucky said weakly against his chest.

Steve held him tighter in response.

*

Steve booked a flight in a few short hours, and in four days’ time they’d be on American soil. Bucky didn’t seem willing to leave Steve’s time in the space between, withdrawn but desperate to maintain constant touch. That simple reassurance that Steve was there was the first he had truly wanted in decades for his own selfish needs.

On the second to last night before their flight, Steve had called Sam from his place in bed, making note of the difference in time zones. It was nice to hear someone else’s voice, someone who wasn’t a broken mass of disconnected thoughts and memories, living the life of a ghost.

Sam made him smile and laugh, filling him with a rare ease, and he forget how seamless their friendship had been. He’d made arrangements to secure his Brooklyn apartment—a nice, spacious place with airy rooms and almost excessive light exposure—and graciously thanked Sam for getting it ready for him since he was living between D.C. and New York now.

“Steve?” Sam asked once their conversation had lapsed.

“Yeah?”

“How are you?” His tone carried a different note from his usual cadence—more serious.

Resting against the headboard on the dim gloom of night, Steve glanced at the sleeping form beside him. Bucky had fallen asleep with his head in Steve’s lap, an arm thrown across his waist, body pressed flush to his. He knew that it was a feat for him to fall asleep when Steve was still awake, to be so vulnerable. It was a measure of trust that he didn’t dare abuse.

Steve smiled fondly at the man before him, brushing a strand of hair from his cheek. There was nothing sexual about the gesture, or even the position they were sleeping in, instead it was something deeper. More than intimate. He may never be with Bucky in the way he truly wanted—the way he dreamed about—but it didn’t mean their relationship was any less important.

“I’m good, Sam.”

A muffled laugh on the other end. “So you finally know what makes you happy?”

There was no hesitation, no second guessing: “Yeah, I do.”

When he ended the call and rested his phone on the nearby nightstand, he felt Bucky shift his grip on Steve’s waist. He looked down at the sudden touch. His blue eyes were open and alert, staring up at Steve almost guilelessly. Steve smiled softly in the dark, reaching out to run his hand over Bucky’s metal shoulder, massaging the uneven seam beneath his artist-deft fingertips. Bucky hummed at the touch, but he didn’t resettle into a comfortable sleeping position like Steve thought he would.

“What’sa matter, Buck?”

“I don’t think they’re going to let me on a plane without taking a decent shower first.”

*

Bucky sat on the closed lid of the toilet, staring vacantly at his pale intertwined hands in his lap. Sparing him a fleeting glance, gaze flitting over Bucky’s loose-limbed posture, Steve turned back to the shower to fiddle with the hot and cold water taps. He held his hand under the stream of water, gauging the temperature until it was a touch over lukewarm.

Steve crouched at Bucky’s feet, arms crossed over his bent legs. His expression was a picture of concern, eyebrows knitted together as he examined Bucky for any sign of conflicting inner turmoil—clenched fists,  elevated breathing, wide pupils—and cataloguing his movements. But Bucky had schooled his features into a blank mask a while ago; sitting there in one of Steve’s oversized T-shirt and faded tracksuit pants.

“You sure you’re gonna be okay?” Steve asked belatedly.

Bucky nodded solemnly, a pronounced muscle working in his throat.

“You know what to do?”

In all the time they spent together, Steve had never known Bucky to wash himself properly. His system of maintaining proper hygiene included splashing his face with a cupped handful of water or over the back of his neck when beads of sweat collected there. Sometimes he even lathered cheap soap from his fingertips to elbows in front of the bathroom mirror as Steve smoothed shaving cream over his five o’clock shadow.

Bucky didn’t tell him he could still remember the bruising force of the pressure hose on his naked skin before he was jostled into a metal coffin, an ice-encrusted window sliding shut over his face as he shakily reached out for something—someone—he didn’t know.

But he needed to start making his own choices, and letting go of the old fears that forever lingered in his mind like sinister tendrils of smoke. He had to stop asking for permission, even if he never felt like Steve was manipulating him in the way his handlers would. Sometimes he still felt the powerful spark of electricity flooding his brain, his body fruitlessly straining against the restraints as his mind was beaten into submission over decades. Bucky touched the side of his face as an afterthought, surprised to find his skin was covered in a layer of grease but otherwise healthy, pulling his hand back as Steve followed his movements and cupped Bucky’s cheek too.

Bucky blinked at Steve, leaning into his touch even though he was taught not to. Steve’s tentative fingers traced the pointed curve of his cheekbone, the line of his jaw, the slope of his nose. His skin crawled with the memory of electrical burns, of a current of crackling energy and heat shooting through him, leaving agonising blisters and welts in its wake.

“Buck?” Steve prompted in a low voice.

Mulling over his answer, Bucky sucked in his lower lip out of habit, noticing how Steve’s gaze flickered downwards to his mouth before looking sidewards distractedly, swallowing thickly. After gaining his ability to breathe properly, Steve turned back to Bucky with an imperceptible flush of red painting his features in the softest blush. Bucky wished he was allowed to do more than touch Steve’s shoulders or hands without earning a tight smile or longing-filled eyes in response.

He closed his eyes to force the thought to flee from his mind, willing himself to be more the man Steve thought he was for just once in his life. He felt another brush of warmth graze over the underside of his eyes, tracing the darkness which was permanently ingrained into his skin. A feeling he couldn’t name settled inside his chest cavity, momentarily soothed by Steve’s careful ministrations.

“C’mon,” Steve said, breaking Bucky’s reverie to urge him to his feet.

Bucky followed Steve towards the running shower, a hand gripped tightly onto the back of his shirt, his mind in a daze but his actions fluid. He stopped at the threshold to the glass structure, a tremor thrumming in his veins. Steve wasn’t deterred, instead dropping his hands to the hem of Bucky’s shirt in question.

He nodded, and Steve proceeded to pull the shirt over his head and Bucky complied, lifting his arms. The cool, moist air hit his skin in a sudden rush, although he didn’t teeter on the edge of debilitating coldness, not when the furnace-like warmth of Steve stood so close.

“Pants?” Steve asked.

Bucky nodded again, his metal hand resting on Steve’s shoulder for balance as fingers slipped inside his waistband. He inhaled sharply through his nose, focusing on the slide of Steve’s fingers over him, his heart expanding at the sensation, threating a moan to rise in the back of his throat. Steve disrobed him in a few seconds, economic in his movements. Bucky stepped out of his the pooled fabric at his feet, making quick work of his boxers until he was standing stark naked in front of Steve, free of his inhibitions. Steve’s gaze remained fixed on his face, his fully body blush deepening with every passing moment. Bucky suppressed the urge to smile at the apparent chastity of one of the most physically imposing men in existence.

A pair of broad hands rested on Bucky’s waist, turning him around and directing him under the spray of water. “C’mon, into the shower,” Steve whispered, breath tickling his ear. Bucky wanted to lean backwards into Steve’s embrace, to press up against him and feel more than covered skin for once, to rely on that constant safe and warmth for weeks on end rather than a few short hours in the night.

But Steve’s touch retreated from his skin as Bucky’s hand met the steady stream of water, and he wanted to chase that contact yet he didn’t know how. Sometimes he was still waiting for Steve to realise the real Bucky wasn’t coming back. That he’d never be more than shattered memories and a face that had lived too many lives, but it never came.

Steve never asked for more, and for that Bucky was immensely grateful he wasn’t forced to lie.

Snapping his head to Steve’s retreating form, Bucky uttered a quiet, “Don’t.” The sound was scared and quivering and _real_ —a cry for something else. There was no hesitation or uncertainty in the action—the decision was Bucky’s own, and that resonated in the rough, pained quality of his voice.

His heart pounding against his ribs, he watched as Steve stopped bodily at the door, a white-knuckled grip on the wooden frame. Bucky didn’t know what conflict he was wrestling with internally, but all he knew was that he wanted Steve close—hell; he didn’t ever want him to leave.

Maybe it was that long-ago echo of Bucky that made him feel like that, or maybe it was this new him that pined for Steve, a jagged patchwork of scars and missing pieces of his mind sewn together and connected by a deep-rooted and inescapable _want_ for the blond man before him.

But Steve turned, a shine to the endless sky blue of eyes, and Bucky offered a weak smile in return. It was all he could give at this moment, and sufficed. Steve approached Bucky slowly, deliberately, and suddenly his shoulders seemed so much broader, his jaw so much more chiselled, his hands larger. He halted at the open shower, reaching back to pull his shirt over his head and his hands dropped to his belt. Bucky’s mouth went dry at the sight, eyes open and breathing laboured.

When Steve had stripped down to nothing—Bucky felt a laugh rising in his chest at how Steve’s socks were the last thing he removed—and straightened, Bucky reached for him instinctively. There was so much skin, golden and smooth and far-reaching, stretching over muscle and sinew and bone. His fingers burned at the contact, the heat of it shocking him. Bucky lightly traced the triangle-shaped indentation at the hollow of Steve’s throat, and the following his clavicle outwards, one hand rounding his shoulder and the other slipping down the toned expanse of his chest, feeling more than seeing Steve’s pointed intake of breath.

Steve’s touch seared the skin of his hipbones, stepping over the lip of the shower door to push Bucky backwards into the spray of water. He knew he had to do this gentle and slow—that any sudden movements would startle Bucky. Bucky hissed as the water splattered over the crown of his head, cascading over his dark hair and forehead. He tensed at the feeling, but Steve kept him grounded, his grip holding him firmly in place.

The constant gust of chilly air was cut short as Steve closed the shower pane shut, effectively sealing him and Bucky in a confined space, damp heat causing beads of condensation to form on their skin. Fear began to replace Bucky’s previous calm, raging against his efforts to keep the feelings under control.

“Hey, hey,” Steve said, fingers intertwining in Bucky’s hair as he pulled him close. “It’s okay, you’re here with me. It’s Steve, I’m here. You’re fine.” With a practised composure, he repeated the words over and over again until it reached the desired effect, trying to get Bucky to focus on him more than anything else. Bucky pressed his face to the familiar crook of Steve’s shoulder, seeking solace. “You’re okay, Buck.”

The frantic heaving of Bucky’s chest eased after a few minutes, the ring of blue around his dilated pupils growing, and he pulled back once he was sure he had adequately reined in his emotions.

“You okay?”

He nodded once, the action shaky.

Steve smiled in reassurance, cradling Bucky’s water-slick cheek in his all-encompassing palm. He wasn’t as shy as Bucky had expected him to be, or even remotely bashful, but when Bucky’s metal fingers brushed low on his hip Steve’s touch trembled against his skin. All fear, doubt, or otherwise negative emotions seemed to flee Bucky’s mind at Steve’s reaction, and rather his feelings were entirely different in nature—more visceral, more selfish and needy and human.

“Stop that and let me get clean,” Bucky said flippantly, knocking Steve’s hand aside whilst supressing the urge to catch the droplet of water that dangled off Steve’s wet lips with his own.

For a moment Steve looked hurt and even saddened by his dismissive rebuttal, but he forced his features into one of bright cheer upon recognising the signs of regret and anxiety in Bucky’s expression. As much as their shared closeness had his mind spiralling into all filthy manners of fantasies, he had to keep a level head for Bucky’s sake. This was a chance he wouldn’t likely get again to appease his traitorous attraction when he really should’ve been taking care of Bucky.

Bucky started to run his hands over his face, swiping the weeks-old grime from his skin, and tipped his head back to wet his hair through. He missed Steve’s helpless gulp at the corner of his eye, and the way he started to vigorously rub his arms clean as a means of keeping his thoughts occupied on anything that wasn’t Bucky. It was inevitable, the way they kept bumping into each other—elbows digging into soft sides, knees against knees, shoulders pressed together no matter what position they were in. Steve could feel his core temperature rising, his hands steadily quivering, like he was shaking with a non-existent cold.

Without thinking, he reached for the cheap, gritty motel soap which rested in the nearby alcove in the tiled wall and succeeded in pressing his body flush to Bucky’s. He didn’t mean to do it—no, it was the last thing he’d intended—but yet he gasped at the sensation of it.

Slick, wet limbs and skin slid against each other in the barest amount of skin contact Steve and Bucky experienced in two years —yet it was still the most contact they’d had in general. Steve clenched his jaw as heat flared low and dangerous in his abdomen, watching as Bucky’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he struggled to swallow a lodge of emotion in his throat. The air was suddenly tense and thick in a way that couldn’t be accredited to steam or simple shared space, an undercurrent of volatile electricity thrumming through both their respective veins.

“Soap?” Steve asked pathetically, his voice no more than a high tremor.

“Yes.” The word escaped through Bucky’s lips, desperate and pleading, belying whatever composure he’d so carefully constructed.

Bucky turned in the cage of Steve’s arms to offer the length of his back, allowing his façade of calm to fall as his finally gaze broke with Steve’s. In the aftermath of his action, he’d felt as if he’d stepped over the line and asked too much of Steve, but the cool press of hands and a rectangular bar of soap to his back silenced his protests.

He ran his hands over Bucky’s back, the motions almost erotic in nature. He worked the soap over Bucky’s skin into a decent lather, white suds rolling down over the ravaged planes of his torso, collecting at the small of his back. Steve allowed his attention focus on the lean expanse of his back, on the evidence of his seventy years without Steve—the stark collage of pink slashes and mottled flesh and pale scar tissue. He paid worship to Bucky’s skin in an attempt to erase the very memory of his time as the Winter Soldier; the taint of all the terrible things he was forced to do; the life of a machine he was forced to live.

Steve knew he was standing too close, that his hands lingered far too long—he knew what he was doing couldn’t be perceived as remotely innocent. He told himself he was doing this to keep Bucky calm and make him feel safe, but his intentions were wholly conducted in his own self-interests.

Long after the skin of Bucky’s back was scrubbed clean and fresh, Steve turned him back around face-to-face, absently massaging the place where metal met skin at his shoulder. Steve knew it still ached, constantly pulling on his tendons and nerves and pain receptors, but his centre of gravity had accustomed to the weight and feel of it. His fingers dipped into the flesh, kneading it until he felt the knot of Bucky’s muscles lapsed into a relaxed state.

Eyes fluttering shut, Bucky’s mouth opened and a small, wistful moan escaped him. Steve’s ministrations faltered for a moment before he persisted, choosing to ignore the deep spark of want the sound elicited. In an effort of subtlety, Steve soon eased the firm press of his fingertips to a light brush before removing his hands completely from Bucky’s body.

In response, Bucky offered him an easy, languid smile that reminded Steve so much of the beautiful, carefree boy he knew from Brooklyn—and he coughed to cover up the whimper caught in the base of his throat.

“I need to wash my hair,” Bucky noted after a few too-quiet seconds, touching the said water-darkened strands. He was more open and relaxed than Steve had ever seen him, and he had to grin at the sight of him—water rivulets running over his face, smiling and naked.

Steve nodded his agreement jerkily, reverting his attention on reaching past Bucky to grab hold of the golden-coloured bottle in another tiled alcove in the shower wall. He felt Bucky grin lazily against his neck, lips skating over Steve’s skin, evoking a rush of fire in his blood. Steve rested his chin against Bucky’s head fleetingly, allowing himself one small fragment of time where he could revel in Bucky’s touch. Bucky huffed a laugh, almost to himself, and pulled the shampoo bottle from Steve’s grip.

“Honeycomb?” Bucky asked, an edge of amusement to his tone as he read the label.

Steve groaned, a wry smile curling his mouth. “I was resting on about three hours sleep and seven cups of coffee over two days. The bottle was on special—it wasn’t like I meant to pick it up.”

Bucky’s previously jubilant expression sobered as he begun to connect the dots—Steve hardly slept whenever Bucky woke up distraught and screaming, and he’d usually sit up in bed for the better part of the night, trying to coax Bucky back to him.

“Don’t worry,” Steve dismissed his concerns with a swipe of a thumb over his forehead, “ever since they pulled me out of the ice it’s been a wonder I could even sleep for more than two hours straight. Making it though a whole night nowadays is a feat. It has nothing to do with you, Buck.”

Bucky’s jaw clenched once before loosening, eyes vulnerable and bright. “C’mon,” he said, glancing to the side to avoid Steve’s searching gaze. “Help me with this.” He held up the shampoo like he didn’t know quite what to do with it, reading the instruction label determinedly.

At first Steve was going to answer teasingly, that it looked like Bucky had never seen a shampoo bottle before or something, but after an assessment of his expression—eyebrows furrowed, mouth downturned—he realised that maybe Bucky hadn’t. He’d barely washed in the past few months he’d been with Steve, and he was sure Bucky hadn’t been doing more than that in the two years prior.

However, he had trained him to fight and survive on the skin of his teeth in the bowels of the universe. Yet Bucky had never learnt how to take proper care of himself—he couldn’t digest solids or wash his hair, let alone remember to sleep for more than thirty minute stretches a day.

“Here,” Steve said, taking the bottle from Bucky and squirting golden-coloured liquid into his ready palm. He manoeuvred Bucky until he wasn’t directly under the spray of heated water, working the shampoo into Bucky’s hair from tips to roots. The smell of honey—sweet and simple and golden—filled the shower. It became increasingly evident that Bucky had never done anything like this before, but between Steve’s intermittent smiles and the soothing massage of his fingers over his scalp he grew comfortable with the newness of it.

Steve angled Bucky’s head back under the showerhead and rinsed the slippery liquid from his hair before proceeding to lather the conditioner through the dark strands. It was a stronger smell than the shampoo, headier too. Once Steve had succeeded in crowning Bucky in a fine head of foam he convinced Bucky to wait a few minutes before washing it out.

The scent of the conditioner was ingrained in his sinus, and Steve wondered if he’d ever be able to mention honeycomb without thinking of this moment again. He and Bucky standing naked under the lukewarm gush of shower water, no more than an inch of space between them, pale golden suds collecting between the webbing of his fingers. Afterwards, Steve moved to brush Bucky’s hair back from his face in a decidedly tender motion, slicking the water-dark strands close to his scalp.

“Steve?” Bucky asked softly, quietly.

“Yeah?”

With one more slow, deliberate breath to settle the raging storm inside him, Bucky finally found his courage long enough to lean forward like he’d wanted to do all night. His pulse thudding loudly in his ears, Steve knew with absolute certainty what he was planning to do, but he didn’t dare move to stop Bucky. He craved this, he’d fantasised this—he’d been waiting for over seventy years for this but—

It was wrong.

Somehow, Steve reached out to press a hand to Bucky’s chest, halting his movements.

The look on Bucky’s face—half-lidded happiness and ease fracturing into broken pieces, giving way to the sharp sting of rejecting, hurt, and confusion clouding his wide, beautiful eyes—ripped away everything good that had taken root inside Steve, everything he had painfully built.

“I don’t want you to do this because you feel like you have to,” Steve rushed to clarify—a desperate attempt to rectify the situation without destroying everything. “I don’t want to do this because you thought I wanted to, or that you remember something like it. I only want you to do this if you want to.”

A fraction of pain faded, but the initial thread of hurt still remained.

“He wanted you,” Bucky said finally, brow furrowed in concentration. Steve startled at the revelation, opening his mouth to disprove the statement, unable to believe that the charming, incredibly handsome Bucky had ever wanted him when every girl in Brooklyn was at his beck and call. “But I want you too.”

Steve sucked in a trembling gasp, fingers quivering by his side.

“You said to me once that you’d do whatever I want if I told you.”

He nodded, feeling if one wrong move would cause him to crack, to break into a million pieces.

“But I’m saying to you now that I’ll do whatever you want, Steve. Just tell me.”

Maybe he should’ve waited, maybe he shouldn’t have wanted more, but Steve _ached_ for it. He’d never wanted anything more. Steve had loved Bucky when they’d shared skinned knees and split lips in dirty alleyways, and later with matching bullet wounds and the contrasting effects of scientific experimentation, and then when both of them had found each other after living far too long, tin soldiers in a new world.

“I want to kiss you, Buck,” he whispered, the sound breathless. Raw. Wrecked.

Bucky’s smile was just as blindingly bright as the old Bucky’s, but different now—because it meant more to Steve than just a practised glint of white teeth and quirked lips. It was a promise. It was hope.

He tipped his head forward, lowering his lips to Bucky’s in a prolonged dip, a feather-touch distance between them. Clear water droplets hung off Bucky’s eyelashes almost poetically, the mere sight of him so beautiful that Steve’s battered, broken heart ached, that he quelled the urge within him to find the nearest page and sketch the image down.

His chest rising in frantic heaves, Bucky caught Steve’s eye before nodding once, supplying his permission. Steve did the same, their noses bumping together due their closeness, sharing the same air. His hand rested on Bucky’s cheek, and Bucky’s metal fingers gripped the toned flesh of Steve’s hip so hard it left five bruised points of pressure on his golden skin.

They moved, closer again, closer still.

Their first kiss was a blink in time, fleeting and close-mouthed.

*

Steve should’ve known Bucky wouldn’t be there in the morning as he woke to the sudden realisation that one side of the bed would be cold and much-too empty. The golden rays of sunshine streamed through the countless arrangement of glass windows over the course of the day as if searching for Bucky.

Eggshell-fragile memories of last night remained—clothed in a blanket of steam and kissing behind the obscure-glass pane of shower, and standing so close he could trim Bucky’s beard with silver scissors and a careful precision, doing the same with his brunet hair before brushing and tying it in a sloppy bun.

Steve had taken liberties with his newfound ability to touch Bucky at his own will, lingering in places he hadn’t before, making note of where his breath hitched or slowed. He hadn’t strayed beneath his abdomen, not wanting to breach that level of trust just yet. Learning Bucky’s body was something Steve planned to do over time, to map the lines and edges of his limbs and skin and muscles.

In retrospect, maybe Steve should’ve paid more attention to Bucky and how his own touches were eager but uncertain, stilted in comparison to Steve’s fervour. But he kept a firm hold on Steve’s elbow, or looped around his waist, pulling at him whenever Steve meandered too far from Bucky. He’d been desperate for that reassurance that Steve was real and close, that his warmth wasn’t a cruel trick, but he was scared to test that aspect of their relationship now. He wanted to fly yet he was scared of falling.

But it had all been too perfect, too easy.

Swinging his legs over the side of the bed to scrape the floor beneath, Steve rested his head in the cradle of his hands before rubbing the grain of exhaustion from behind his eyes. He sighed, long and mournful on the lip of the distressed mattress in a hotel—he’d given up on motels—room somewhere in rural France.

But the arrangements had been made, and he knew spending any more time in Europe would lead to a deterioration of everything he and Bucky had fought to build. The flight to New York was scheduled for today—and Sam was waiting. And so, Steve gathered his wits and stumbled onto his feet, swaying once as he stood. He went through the mundane motions of living: dressing, eating, pulling the sheets and covers of his bed into tight military corners.

He had never noticed Bucky’s absence so keenly, the exposed skin of Steve’s neck and hands cold and wrong without his constant touch. The mere sight of the door to the bathroom caused his stomach to roil, his chest to heave, so he avoided it at all costs. At the threshold of the doorway, Steve stopped himself to glance once more at the room’s interior, shoulders tensing at the folded pile of clothes resting on the bed’s edge.

He only spoke four times in his travel to Rome, his words clipped but inherently polite, checking out of the hotel, crossing cobblestone streets and either catching a bus or hailing a cab before pulling up to the international airport in a number of hours.

Steve tried not to scan the crowd for a baseball cap and a nondescript brown jacket in the long hallways, in the waiting area or in the tarmac, but he did anyway. His insides were twisted and coiled tight as he sat in the ergonomic chairs in the lead up to boarding, nerves forcing his foot to bounce and his hands to shake.

He wanted to tell the pilots to wait a few more minutes as he stepped onto the floor of the plane, to grab the nearby stewardess and plead until his throat was hoarse when he saw the seat next to his was empty. But when the motor whirred to life with an almighty roar, as the large flying machine started to move and deftly manoeuvre onto the landing strip, Steve’s heart plummeted. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow the lodge of emotion in his throat. There was that instinctive feeling to fight and rage and scream at the unfairness of it all, but he had to have faith.

Bucky knew his apartments address, and he’d approximated when Steve would land and find a grinning Sam at the baggage claim. He’d calculated when they’d load into his car and drive to a decidedly normal place Steve had bought years ago but had never gotten around to living in just yet.

It’d be alright—it had to.

The flight went off without a hitch, and the landing was textbook-perfect. He was hustled off the plane and onto the tarmac, making a military-like beeline towards the baggage claim where he glimpsed the erect stance of a tall, dark figure in civilian clothing, holding a sign that read: _The Second Most Handsome Man In The World_. It was corny and stupid—even for Sam’s amusingly tasteless standards—but Steve crushed him in a hug he didn’t even know he needed until Sam was holding him in return just as tight, just as close.

Yes, Steve craved Bucky’s touch more often than not, and he offered his own when it was needed, but with Sam it was simple and unhurried and devoid of the need to explain every move or word or feeling. He relied on their plutonic relationship more heavily than he dared with Bucky. Sam was his brother-in-arms—he had his back through thick and thin, rain or fire.

“He coming?” Sam asked as Steve pulled back, adjusting the strap which dug into his shoulder.

“I hope.”

He refused Sam’s proposal to eat out at a diner or grab an all-American burger somewhere, and they lapsed into a familiar, light-hearted banter on their meandering ride over to Steve’s apartment. Steve watched as the Brooklyn-skyline filtered past in a bustle of night-darkened blur of brick buildings and orange streetlight. It put his worries at ease almost instantly, being in a place where everything—sight, smell, taste, the roar of countless engines beneath his feet—reminded of home.

Sam—as gracious as he was—carried the brunt of Steve’s bags up the stairs of his apartment building, to his door on the third floor up, taking every chance to laugh and smile, sincere and loud. Even though he grew pensive whenever he noticed the tired creases at the corners of Steve’s eyes, his downturned mouth, or his sluggish movements.

Sam was worried this was thing with Bucky eventually going to destroy them both, but he knew he couldn’t so casually label them as a _thing—_ the tragic pair was bound in life and in death, a few too many lives over the accepted quota.

 Steve stopped inside the dim light of the kitchen, assessing the apartment before him. It was exactly what he wanted—wooden floorboards, ergonomic furniture and an excess of windows to allow adequate light exposure, spacious yet secluded. Sam had even arranged a few personalised pictures around the pace—pictures of Steve over his lifetime, black-and-white or in colour, and the people he had known in the length of it. He didn’t even know the majority of those photos existed, but he took it all in his stride, even if he knew he’d turn the most reminiscent frames on their faces once Sam had left.

A few personal affects, from what Steve discovered, were the Avengers doing. A plastic toy Iron Man only Tony would’ve had the gall to purchase. An otherworldly flower pressed between sheets of paper from Thor. A fossil immortalised in a glass cube to Nat’s utter amusement. Bruce’s thoughtful gift of a rare photo of Steve and Bucky that could only have been retrieved deep from historical archives. And one of Clint’s arrows in a display case with the note that read: _This is one of the twelve arrows I own, Rogers, so use it wisely_.

His smile was fond as he looked over the collection of gifts he’d received from Earth’s mightiest heroes. It made the past twenty-fours a little easier to bear, knowing that in the last couple years he’d been in self-imposed exiled in the cold, far reaches of Europe he’d never been alone, at least not really.

Steve leaned back against the kitchen counter and tried not to visualise a different room in France, a bathroom where he could still feel the water-slick skin under his supple fingers and Bucky lazily mouthing over his shoulder, his neck, his cheek. He shook his head to dislodge the thought from his mind, offering Sam an unconvincing smile at his concerned, querying look.

“Do you think he’ll come back?” Sam asked after a moment’s lapse on the couch later, long after the clock had struck midnight, their conversation having exhausted all possible routes.

“I don’t know, Sam,” Steve answered truthfully, “but I want to believe he will.”

“Do you want him to come back?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think him coming back will be beneficial to you both?”

It was quick, without hesitation: “Yes.”

Sam’s laugh was warm and rich, filling the quiet atmosphere of the apartment. “Then that’s all that needs to be said on the subject,” Sam concluded, slapping his hands on his knees and standing up. “Well, Cap, it’s been swell, but I have to be somewhere in”—he glanced fleetingly at his electronic wristwatch—“four hours, so I think it’s about due time I hit the sack.”

Steve followed him to the door and eventually let Sam out between three separate hugs, murmuring his goodbyes whilst trying not to reveal the marrow-deep tiredness which threatened to claim him forever. His depression didn’t reach the same disastrous extent it had in Europe—where suicide seemed a real possibility to Steve, but it was still bad.

“Goodnight, Steve,” Sam said cheerily, even in the drag of the wee morning hours. “I have to go now.”

“Goodbye,” Steve whispered to Sam’s retreating back, catching the flick of his wrist in a belated wave.

Steve closed the door, resting against bodily. The apartment was too quiet without another voice to fill the still air—no shuffling of Bucky in bed or bathroom, sitting on the table or kitchen counter as Steve brewed his coffee, or curled on the window seat when the sun was warm sugar-spun gold.

Even though he hated the prospect of slipping into a bed that was cold and much-too big, Steve knew his internal clock was barely functioning. He needed sleep—if it was only few broken, sporadic hours over the coming night. He stripped off his clothes, rolling under the thick duvet cover in his socks and briefs. The air was warmer here, mainly due to the window he’d left open to blow softly in the night breeze.

By the thirty minute mark he felt the downwards pull of his eyelids, the buzz of city life lulling into a contented state of not-sleeping, resting more than anything else. He didn’t hear the rattle of the fire escape, but Steve did notice the mattress dip under a sudden weight, his body rolling towards the readjusted centre of gravity. Blearily, he blinked frantically to clear his vision as the familiar shape and feel of Bucky’s body pressed close to him, arranging the blankets over them both.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky murmured against the side of Steve’s forehead, breath warm but lips cold. His metal fist curled over his hip, insistently breaching the space between them. “I’m sorry, Steve, I’m so sorry.”

He groped for Bucky, his fingers finding his metal arm and ghosting over his shoulder, neck, and face, bringing his mouth down to his. It was a clumsy action, teeth knocking and senses dulled with fatigue, but Steve moaned at the contact anyway. He drank in the taste of Bucky, revelling in his simple heat of skin and metal, catching the wisps of honey in his hair. Bucky kissed him back, but it was tentative and unsure press of lips, like he didn’t fully understand Steve’s reaction.

“I don’t care, Buck, I really don’t. I just—” Steve said in a rush, pushing Bucky onto his back to gain better access to his mouth. For once it was him asking for Bucky to reassure him he was still there, that his presence was something tangible, that he could kiss without waking up in heaving gasps. “Just come back to me, just stay with me.” He hovered over Bucky, his larger body bracketing his possessively, their mouths spit-slick and red. “I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t stay, not now. Not ever.”

It was Bucky’s turn to act as a source of comfort. He touched his forehead to Steve’s, soothing everything he could reach. “It’s okay, Steve.” He was whispering, making promises in the dark. “I’m here, I’m here.”

Bucky didn’t realise that he wasn’t the only one fraying at the edges that night, and when he finally convinced Steve to lay down beside him—head pillowed on his chest and Bucky’s lips to his hair, Steve’s arm thrown across his chest—he realised that Steve wasn’t just there to help him down the dark, untrodden paths to his recovery. Steve had also followed him into the abyss too.

*

At first Bucky was hesitant to wander through Steve’s apartment further than his bedroom door, like he was scared to settle in a permanent location. He’d only venture into the en suite when Steve was in sprawled in bed or seated at his nearby desk to comb through the thirty-four months of mail Sam had been collecting for him, but Bucky hadn’t broached the subject of showering again.

He was used to assessing his surrounding environment with an impeccable sniper-sharp detail, but here he had only barely scarped the surface. Unnerved, his initial reservations of holding his hands at bay whenever he passed Steve and instinctively reached forward to touch the bare skin of his neck. Sometimes Steve would turn to catch the tail ends of his aborted actions, and he’d just close the space between him and Bucky in a few short strides, hands resting on his sides as he pressed their lips together. Usually Bucky would step back, unable to accept Steve’s touch, hating that he’d ever put Steve in a position where his whole world centred on him.

“Buck,” Steve would say, “you don’t have to be so afraid all the time. I’m not going anywhere.”

Maybe Steve didn’t understand—or maybe he did—but Bucky knew he was treading new water here. He could barely remember how he’d made it to Brooklyn the same night he did, how he’d ever scaled the fire escape to crawl into bed with him without falling to pieces. Bucky thought that because he’d come so close to the precipice of losing everything he had—that Steve would slip through his fingers and become another faded phantom lingering in his mind—that he was unwilling to get so close again.

Bucky told himself it was for the greater good, that he’d leave under the shroud of darkness and never look back, but whenever he curled up beside Steve for what he decided was _the last time_ he couldn’t seem to bear the thought of ever leaving.

Steve was the smell of pancake batter in the morning, and far-reaching fields of summer grass, and the endless stretch of pale eggshell-blue sky after the sun had breached the horizon. He was a glass of water pressed to his lips and a swift kiss to his forehead, the thread of music from a different era filtering through an old radio station in the apartment.

He embodied comfort and warmth and—

—Steve was home to Bucky. He was the After to his twisted, contorted, painful Before.

Maybe that’s why running away had always seemed the easiest option to Bucky—because turning to face the hellish league of demons which laid in wait to tear him apart was a harder feat to overcome.

They never expected it to be easy, yet they’d never learned the meaning of easy in their collective lives.

Whatever problems, whatever fear and half-forgotten memories haunted them both, their moments of reprieve were worth it all. The small fragments in between mattered, where Bucky wasn’t resentful of Steve’s coddling and Steve’s selfish need to centre his world on Bucky and ignore everyone and everything else didn’t threaten to destroy them both, and the sun was able to break through the dense cloud cover.

But in the here and now, Steve put all his effort into focusing on Bucky. He had guessed right in regards to sunlight—there never was a moment he didn’t shuffle barefoot into his room to see Bucky propped against the window frame, one leg draped over the edge and the other pulled up to his chest, his head tipped back to bask in the diamond-bright light which streamed through the oblong window pane.

The sight was almost too perfect to disturb, and the artist within Steve was inspired to document this moment, to put the image to paper and never risk losing it again. Tony had acquired—God knows how—a few of his old sketchbooks from before the war, and they sat nostalgic and untouched in his desk drawer.

Steve set a glass of water on the nearby bedside table and the small clink as the cup hit the wooden surface was enough to rouse Bucky from his contented slumber. He blinked at Steve, no wide-eyed confusion or a frantic rise and fall of his chest to signal his growing panic, just a calm, level gaze resting on Steve.

“You okay?” Steve asked, more out of habit than a genuine need to do so.

Bucky flinched, his loose-shouldered ease replaced with a tenser posture. Eventually, as if mulling over a proper response, he spoke. “Do you remember how I’d say you’d never stop asking?” he asked evenly.

“Yeah,” Steve said after a beat’s hesitation, eyebrows knitting together, “but that was about how much you remembered.”

“It’s the same thing, Steve.” Bucky turned his head, breaking the line of contact between them. “But—” He stopped, his head hanging forward as the words ran dry in his mouth, the well emptied long ago. “But you need to understand that I’ll never be okay, not in the way you want me to be. I’ll never be him, I’ll never see things the way you do. All I can give you is what I have left.”

Mouth pressed into a thin line, Steve managed to push the words past the lodge in his throat. “Do you know that when you said that to me last you would barely look at me? You weren’t calm. You were bitter and angry and resentful of everything I represented.” He ensured his voice was strong even as his hands wavered. Steve saw Bucky’s assessing gaze flicker downwards to the shake of his fingers, but his expression remained blank. He continued, “I know communication is hardly one of our strong points, but you need to know that I’m happy with where you—and _we_ —are at. I’m not asking for a miracle, I’m just asking for you.”

Bucky stared at Steve without blinking for a prolonged span of time, the moment stretching too thin for Steve’s liking, enough that he started to dread the inevitable rebuttal—when Bucky’s eyes would freeze over and he’d grow distant, unresponsive.

But, instead, Bucky reached for Steve’s wrist in a gentle hold. He shuffled forward on the bench, even though it was spacious enough for three grown men to sit shoulder-to-shoulder, and allowed Steve to connect the dots. Steve slotted his body in behind Buck, looping a large arm around his waist and pulling Bucky’s between his open legs, leaving no space—or reason—to doubt the meaning behind his actions.

Bucky readjusted his position, his back against Steve’s front, and soon settled with no other qualms on the subject. Bucky’s head rested on Steve’s broad collarbone, subtly angled to the side so his forehead brushed Steve’s chin, and he was rewarded with a ready kiss to his crown. Flesh and metal fingers soon began to trace absent patterns over the two forearms which rested over Bucky’s stomach, revelling in the warmth of Steve’s embrace, the safety of it. The relaxed line of Bucky’s body, the way he was able to find comfort in Steve’s arm so easily, caused a smile to pull at Steve’s lips.

No matter what was to come, what mattered most was now. He was no longer trailing after a dead man in Europe, or struggling to find any trace of an old one in dim motel rooms or between starched bed sheets. Instead he had Bucky. His memories were fractured and scattered across decades he could barely recall, and it was uncertain if his mind would ever fully recover or not, but Bucky’s chest beat, beat, and beat with the promise of something new and good and whole.

*

At the threshold to Steve’s apartment, Steve recognised the prevalent signs of fear in Bucky’s expression with a concerned appraisal. His jaw alternated between clenching and unclenching, air escaping in harsh wheezes through his nose. Their fingers were interlaced at the door, Steve in the hallway and Bucky stalling inside the apartment, a thread of connection still weaving them together.

“We don’t have to—

“Don’t, Steve.” Bucky near spat. “I need to do this.”

They’d set the date a few days ago, when Steve had made sure the weather was clear and fine on a regular Wednesday morning, the weekly grind having caused the usual swell of people to have dissipated in size over the crisscrossed map of city streets. He knew now that he should’ve played it by ear rather than trying to fit it into a neat little box. Bucky knew Steve desperately wanted to introduce Bucky to his— _their_ —childhood home, so he’d said he would. He’d promised.

But they’d had a rough morning. Bucky had woken up with bile burning the back of his throat and hands gripping the roots of his hair until it ached, pulled too-tight. Steve had been roused awake by Bucky’s quiet, consistent whimpers, the body beside his own curled into a ball as to minimise his pain.

“Hey, hey,” Steve had said, using calming tones. “Buck, you’re with me. You’re with Steve.” His arm fitted across his chest like a vice, holding Bucky to him, firmly keeping him in place. “You’re okay, I’m here.”

“Steve—” Bucky choked out, voice thick with emotion.

Steve gathered him closer, curling around Bucky until there was no point where their bodies didn’t touch. Sometimes he didn’t feel anything, lapsing back into the blank-stared Winter Soldier who despised everything human, but other times he managed to feel everything all at once—pain, terror, guilt, misunderstanding, resentment, and a shadow of the all-consuming good he had known with Steve.

But Bucky had persisted, eventually rising into a sitting position, and at Steve’s gentle coaxing he’d even swallowed a few mouthfuls of water between encouraging kisses. Steve had sat behind him on the rumbled sheets of the bed, supporting Bucky’s puppet-like body in the cradle of his legs, pressing his lips to his brow, cheek, chin, shoulders and the back of his neck in an attempt to keep him tethered to this world.

It had worked, in the end. Bucky had slowly gained control of his breathing and the tension disappeared from his shoulders, seeping through his muscles and tendons and out of his fingertips. He’d turned in Steve’s embrace and surged upwards to kiss him wetly, openly—chasing away the darkness which still clutched to his mind, the pound in his chest easing. And when Bucky felt a hand to his neck he didn’t experience the rush of cold dread, or the knee-jerk reaction to push Steve away.

Bucky moved with a purpose now, asking for more than chaste contact, lips pressing harder and faster, fuelled by the intention to immerse himself in the very feel and taste of everything Steve had to offer. Much too short, Steve had broken the kiss and pulled backwards until Bucky’s mouth couldn’t reach his, despite the abilities of his decidedly limber body. Bucky could feel him panting, Steve’s broad chest moving frantically against his back, but yet he was adamant not to kiss Bucky again.

“Are you doing this to avoid going outside or because you want to, Buck?” Steve asked, his voice a little more hoarse than its usual cadence.

“Both.”

He frowned, and then a corner of his mouth curved upwards in a mischievous quirk. “If you decide to come out with me I’ll do whatever you want when we get home, okay?” It wasn’t a pass for sex—hell, they hadn’t done more than kiss at a time—but it was enough to pique Bucky’s interests.

Steve knocked their foreheads together in question, that wry smile causing his face to smooth into a contented, teasing expression that actually belonged to someone his age—someone Bucky hardly ever saw. He nodded eventually, contorting his body at an impossible angle to kiss Steve once more before levering himself out of bed.

With his shoulder-length hair tied back and a spare baseball cap pulled low over his brow, Bucky lingered at the apartment door. He wore a grey long-sleeved T-shirt, jeans, heavy black engineer boots and a leather glove on one hand—most of his wardrobe belonged to Steve, but they’d been making their way through the department stores online. But he stood stiffly, adopting more of a stern soldier-like stance than a civilian.

“Buck,” Steve said softly, pulling at their conjoined hands. “Come on, we’ll take it one step at a time.”

He nodded jerkily, forcing himself to carefully re-enter the human world as a man without a metal arm and a chequered past for Steve’s sake. “Door?” he asked, adjusting to the step-by-step process.

Steve’s smile was blinding. “Door,” he affirmed.

Bucky moved with a hesitant wariness, like a spooked animal. In one stride his gloved hand gripped the doorframe so hard the wood creaked in protest, but he was balancing on the edge between apartment and hallway. Steve urged him forward with another wondrous smile, marvelling at Bucky’s progress, and then he was more than halfway there. Steve’s fingers moved to curl in the fabric of his shirt and tugged him forward, head angled down for a ready kiss.

Bucky took one last breath, expelling air from his lungs entirely, and crossed the threshold to fully enter the space of the hallway. Steve was there, arms encircling Bucky and possessively claiming his lips in a deep kiss, pouring everything he had into showing Bucky how proud he was, how happy.

Steve leaned backwards with a smile that was increasingly becoming a more common fixture in Bucky’s life rather than a temporary occurrence. “Hallway?” he prompted.

“Hallway.”

They repeated the process as far as it would go—stairs, lobby, front entrance, sidewalk, cab—to a slow, plodding success. Sometimes Bucky had to stop, sometimes he looked like he wanted to run and run and run, but he never went through on it. Steve didn’t stray more than an arm’s length from Bucky at all times, acting as an omnipresent source of reassurance, a patience that even rivalled Sam’s.

But Bucky was still scared—he was scared because it had been the first time in over nearly three years he wasn’t lingering at the edges of Steve’s vision in Europe, or lying in bed with him but not touching, or straining with everything he had not to kiss him under a warm spray of water. He’d never entered the public eye unarmed and vulnerable before, as a person rather than a weapon, and especially not with Steve. Bucky couldn’t protect him; he couldn’t even stop a sniper from taking aim atop a building and shooting a clean line through Steve’s head when he stood right by him. HYDRA was pushed to the back of his mind, ice-encrusted windows and leather cuffs and increased voltages of electricity a distant but ever-present fear.

“Buck?” Steve was there, he was with him—a hand to his metal elbow, so close his breath was warm on Bucky’s cheek. “You with me?”

He didn’t realise he’d practically been panting now, frozen on the sidewalk in a Brooklyn neighbourhood he should’ve remembered. A few passer-by’s filtered past in a steady flow, glancing at them fleeting out of mild curiosity before continuing on their way. Bucky’s vision blurred, the earthy red colour of layer upon layer of brick and the bright blue of the sky coalescing into one indistinct image, the cement ground beneath his feet swirling beneath him.

“Bucky?”

His pulse thudded loudly in his ears, a tremor rolling through him without relent.

“Bucky—?”

“Sir?” It was a different voice, feminine yet croaky with age.

Bucky started at the sound of it, pressing bodily to Steve with a force that knocked him a step back. Steve huffed at the sudden impact, but took it in his stride, angling his body so Bucky was shielded behind him. His gloved hand clutched desperately at the back of Steve’s plaid shirt, face hovering over his shoulder.

An old woman asked if they were okay concernedly, grey hair pinned beneath an old-fashioned hat and frail hands clutching her purse delicately. She talked to Steve but her age-blurred eyes rested on Bucky. He tried, he really did—but his mind filled with the image of his hands wrapped around her exposed neck, her brittle spine snapping like a twig. His hold of Steve’s shirt tightened, near ripping the fabric as he closed his eyes to block out the flash of intrusive images, a spike of pain driving through his skull.

Bucky heard the word “PTSD” amidst Steve and the woman’s conversation, his tone initially clipped and polite yet now edging on a quiet fondness. She smiled once, directing a question towards Bucky he could hardly hear through the rush of blood in his ears. It was something about him getting better with time, but he didn’t care—he just wanted her to leave before he lost that tenuous control of his thoughts.

Steve was surprised when Bucky nodded jerkily behind him, the action causing his chin to knock Steve’s shoulder. The woman smiled again before leaving, but it wasn’t before she rounded the corner ahead Bucky was able to trust himself to be weak—well, not weak, just whatever he was around Steve.

Steve stumbled under Bucky’s sudden weight, but he managed to hold him up like always.

“You—”

Bucky—his face currently resting between Steve’s shoulder blades—murmured his muffled protest. “Just give me a minute, Steve. I need to—” He hissed through his teeth as another shard of pain embedded into his brain, the remnant of HYRDA still lingering in the recesses of his psyche.

Steve didn’t press the issue, and Bucky was glad he didn’t.

A few minutes later Bucky was able to open his eyes without wincing at the bright glint of sunlight. He stepped back from Steve, vehemently hating the space but knowing he needed the distance—people could be watching, making assumptions. He wasn’t going to risk Steve being hurt, not even when he looked like he wanted to kiss Bucky right there on the street, regardless of what people thought.

“I’m okay,” Bucky said, expression still clouded with the haze of inner turmoil.

Steve nodded, somehow able to repress the urge to reach for Bucky’s wrist, his cheek, his anything. The two of them walked together at a leisurely pace, not rushing but not loitering as one head scanned the rooftops for signs of danger and the other catalogued his every movement. Their steps matched a soldier’s stride—long and purposeful—but their posture was tense.

It still felt fragile, unworldly—like one wrong move could shatter it all.

Bucky stopped at the mouth to an alleyway, staring intently into the chasm of brick walls, rusted pipe fixtures and grimy window panes. The floor was almost stained black with foul-smelling liquid. It wasn’t even worth a passing glance—a place that was rarely visited and largely ignored.

If it was so meaningless, then why did Bucky feel that _push_ at his mind? His memories were trying to slot back into place even though countless electroshock procedures had burned his ability to do so.

“Steve?” Bucky questioned, turning to the blond man behind him for an answer.

Steve looked almost melancholic, advancing a few steps forward to pick up a round, silver object. The metal was dented and his broad hand couldn’t properly grasp the lid of the trash can, but the image was enough to piece together the fragments of memory—

—A younger Steve, skinny and obstinate, horribly outmatched to a man twice his size.

—A cut lip and bloodied knuckles.

—“ _I could do this all day.”_

“It was before the war,” Bucky mused quietly, hands fisted by his sides even though his voice remained steady. “When we were still—” The word hung suspended in the air, taunting them both— _normal_ , _when we were both still normal_. Before serums and vibranium shields and metal arms—before they had learnt how to serve and die rather than struggle and fight to live.

“I was always pulling you out of brawls, ones that _you_ always managed to start.” Bucky was struck by the sudden need to smile, full and bright and dashing, like he knew the old Bucky would’ve. Instead his facial muscles lapsed into a neutral expression, sobering at the thought—that Bucky had died in the Alps, snow resting on his blood-splattered brow, his hand still outstretched to Steve above.

“You never seemed to be out of one,” he finished solemnly.

Steve’s smile was small and pained, his lips bloodless.

“Why’d you always do that? Get into fights you couldn’t win?”

Steve shrugged in an action that was so familiar—the mere sight of it etched into Bucky’s memory, faded but nonetheless real—that Bucky was rendered unable to breathe. Even now he could see a smaller man lifting his shoulders in the exact same way, eyebrows knitted together in an ever-present anger and never completely happy, but telling Bucky he was anyway.

In the dank, dimly-lit space of the alleyway Bucky closed the space between him and Steve to kiss him lightly, swiftly. His flesh hand grazed the hem of his shirt in a whisper of contact. As he pulled back Steve noted the melancholic tinge to Bucky’s quick, somewhat unexpected display of affection, but thankfully he didn’t question why.

“We went to Stark’s expo next, didn’t we?”

Steve nodded, following Bucky footsteps out of the darkness and onto the sidewalk. “Yeah, you dragged me to a double date all the way over in Queens for that.”

“Is it still there?”

Steve laughed softly, amusement colouring his tone. “Tony runs a few shows every now and then, although he relies a lot more on gaudy exposition than Howard ever did. But it really all boils down to bright lights and pretty girls in the end—I guess showmanship is a hereditary trait in that particular family tree.”

The conversation trickled to a halt, but a comfortable silence filled the surrounding air as Bucky and Steve wandered through the streets of Brooklyn, following paths they knew yet could barely remember. Steve called it muscle memory, watching his and Bucky’s booted feet adjusting to the cracked, undulating length of concrete without thought, matching the rhythm of the city.

Smells and sounds enveloped Bucky, identifying the sensory recognition of something that was gritty and chaotic and _real_ —homage to another place and time he had once belonged to. It still hurt, remembering things that had been beaten out of him, but he could do it now without fear of losing a part of himself. He could never really break his conditioning—thunderclap-loud sounds triggered that ingrained instinct to bare his teeth and fight, and he still slept within two feet of a knife—but he had the ability to defy it, in small ways.

When Steve looked at him like he was a person, like he was a living and breathing body whose heart still beat and thoughts were still whole. Bucky wanted to be better for him—that’s what mattered; that’s what burnt the wounds which festered on his soul.

Even though the long and arduous process of his recovery would be met with trials and tribulations, even though HYDRA had taken everything from him, even though he had been twisted it into something that was bent of shape, a warped and broken tin man—they hadn’t counted on Steve Rogers.

*

“You should start running with Sam again.” Bucky said abruptly one night, propped on the lip of the claw-footed bathtub with a cat-like balance.

Steve threw him a curious sidewards glance from his position in front of the bathroom mirror, wiping his razor clean before proceeding to shave his five o’clock shadow. An old-fashioned radio rested precariously on the marble rim of the sink, the background set to the jazz-smooth sound of their childhood.

They had lapsed into a number of decidedly domestic occurrences, occupying each other’s space rather than remaining absent from it. After so long separated it was a relief retuning to situations where they were naturally attuned to the other’s presence, reading their mood by the movements of their body. Bucky hadn’t expected their relationship to be so symbiotic, but then again, maybe that’s why they had both managed to live so long—just waiting for the moment where the could circle back to one another.

“Why do I need to start running with Sam?” Steve asked, focusing on the razor in his careful grip.

“Because it’d be good for you.”

“And this isn’t?”

Bucky frowned, meeting Steve’s readily defensive gaze in the mirror. “I’m not trying to attack you, Steve,” he argued, an undercurrent of anger to his words, “I just thought that your life should extend beyond this apartment.”

“You mean it should extend beyond you,” Steve’s tone was sharp, brutal.

“Yes,” Bucky said starkly. “Because you gave up Captain America to find me. You haven’t touched your shield in years. You haven’t spoken more than two sentences to either someone who tried to kill you, or someone who tried to save you from that person who tried to kill you.” Bucky speaking irrationally, he was just frustrated. “So, yes, I don’t need you fading from the face of the world just so I don’t have to spend the day alone.”

Steve finished shaving, running water over the blade routinely before speaking. “But I wanted to do all those things, Buck.” He said. “I made that choice, and I don’t regret a single second of it. Not one.” His tone was gentle, and his expression was even softer still.

Bucky blinked, stunned.

Steve came to crouch before Bucky, a picture of all-American male in flannel pyjama bottoms and a white singlet, kneeling at the feet of an ex-Soviet assassin. “I’m not going to apologise for the decisions I made, especially not ones that focus on you. But if you think it’d be a beneficial decision for us both, I’d like to start running with Sam again.”

His breathing was shallow, lungs struggling under the crushing weight of his heart. “Then do it.”

Steve’s answering smile was blinding.

*

Sam was scheduled to be arriving in New York a week later. He had mentioned possibly moving here a few weeks ago since Tony and most of the Avengers had enlisted his help in the aftermath of their own personal crises. Superheros that experienced post-traumatic stress or anxiety issues usually played it off, and few psychiatrists were able to relate to them in the way Sam had, so he was almost the perfect candidate to fill the role of resident shrink. Although he was initially reluctant to move, Sam soon realised he was able to do something few others could, and he’d fully committed to accepting Tony’s offer after Steve had suggested exercising together when he was in town next.

There was a knock at the door before sunrise.

“That’d be Sam,” Steve said, fingers threaded through Bucky’s hair. Steve was sitting back against the headboard, awake with excitement, and Bucky had followed his body’s line of movement. His head rested against Steve’s chest, curled on his side, arm thrown across his stomach possessively.

Bucky mumbled his protest weakly, nuzzling further into his warmth.

Steve’s chest shook with rumbling laughter, fingers reaching up to thread through Bucky’s thick hair. “You’re the one who suggested I do this, Buck,” his tone was fond, the smile evident in his voice. “So it sorta means you don’t have the right to complain about it.”

A determined quirk to his mouth, Bucky stirred, rising to straddle Steve in one swift motion.

Steve gasped at the contact, proceeding to make a little noise of warning in the back of his threat.

“Yeah?” Bucky asked, titling his head to the side.

Another knock, more insistent.

“I’ll be there in a minute!” Steve called out, his voice straining halfway through as Bucky’s lip closed wetly over his neck, a hint of teeth grazing his skin. Then, in a hushed whisper, “Bucky, c’mon, I have to go let Sam in.” His argument lacked any real conviction, broad hands covering the bare expanse of Bucky’s chest, unable to push him back. “I can’t leave him standing out in the hallway because you wanna fool around.”

“I’m sure Sam can wait.”

“No, he really can’t.”

Bucky hovered over Steve, hair hanging in dark, limp strands around his face in the pre-dawn light. His expression was light and teasing, his face smooth and youthful without seventy years of fragmented torture and grief bearing down on him. Steve smiled once before sliding his arms around the back of Bucky’s thighs and swinging his feet onto the floor, lifting Bucky up as he stood. Bucky’s legs instinctively wrapped around his waist to steady himself. Steve adjusted to the sudden weight, locking Bucky in place without much effort.

“If you let me go on a run”—Bucky’s eyebrow quirked, because it hardly seemed like he was in control of the situation anymore—“I might consider letting you can join me in the shower when I come back.”

That caught Bucky’s attention—he rarely showered, and ones that he took alone were even scarcer. He still couldn’t gauge when he needed to complete certain mundane activities, like eating or washing, but more often than not Steve followed him to bed, and he had a glass of water whenever Steve cooked a meal. It wasn’t the most full-proof system that helped him adjust to everyday life, but it worked for Bucky—and Steve had learnt to count that as a win in his books.

“Promise?” Bucky asked.

“Promise.”

A beat of satisfied silence. “You can let me down now, Steve.”

He muttered something long-suffering before lowering Bucky to his feet, pressing a kiss to his forehead to appease him before swiftly changing into a tight T-shirt, sweatpants, and finding a pair of socks. Steve called out to Sam as he jogged to the front of his apartment, unlocking the deadbolt and pulling the door open. He was greeted to the amused sight of Sam’s smile, leaning against the door in a much-too casual position.

“Trouble getting out of bed?”

Steve felt his entire face and torso flush a hot red. “Something like that,” he replied meekly, a hand rubbing over the back of his neck. To deflect from his embarrassment, Steve invited Sam inside as he moved to lace his sneakers up at the kitchen table, accepting Sam’s offer to fix him a bowl of gruel and a pot of coffee.

“He doing okay?” Sam asked, sparing him a sidewards glance from the island bench, stirring a drizzle of honey into the bowel of porridge, mindful of their close proximity to the bedroom.

His answer was curt: “As good as he can be.”

“And you?”

“Better than what I was.”

Sam didn’t press the subject any further. He knew that even though Steve and Bucky had hardly scraped the surface on a lifetime worth of issues that needed to be addressed, they were making progress—albeit slow, painful progress. Every success was hard-won, but it was success nonetheless. They took things day-to-day, step-by-step, edging closer and closer to some semblance of normality—although they had never wanted normal, just comfortable. A promise of good amongst the dark, far-reaching bad.

“I should meet him soon, maybe I could help with a few things,” Sam suggested lightly, placing a bowl and a steaming mug before Steve and sitting beside him at the table. “Some people can’t really rely on the same person to do everything for them. You can’t have one designated person for providing comfort, and then to deal with their own psychological trauma.”

Steve sighed deeply. “I don’t think he’s ready to meet new people, and I can’t really say he’ll ever be.”

“You sure about that?”

Steve’s glanced at him in question, a spoonful of sweetened porridge raised to his mouth. Sam inclined his head towards a spot behind Steve, and he turned—

—Bucky was standing at the threshold to his bedroom, dressed in one of Steve’s oversized shirts and the loose pants he’d slept in, rumpled with sleep but alert with tension. His face was carefully schooled into a blank mask, assessing Steve and Sam seated at the kitchen table, gaze running over their body language and expressions analytically.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve said softly, bursting with a golden bubble of happiness. In the few times they had ventured outside Bucky didn’t approach anyone who wasn’t Steve, didn’t show any signs of outward emotion, his speech stilted and blunt. The fact that he was willing for Sam to witness him in such a vulnerable state meant that he was trying—that he was getting better.

Bucky’s eyes flickered to his for a moment, a glimpse of emotion glimmering beneath the surface, before snapping back to Sam. He held himself stiffly, wound tight, ready to spring at any sudden movement.

Steve had never been gladder that Sam knew how to handle himself around veterans, holding his posture non-threateningly and smiling, not holding eye contact any longer than necessary. “Hi,” he said, “you joining us for a run?”

Bucky’s reaction was limited to the word: “No.”

“Well, nice to have finally meet you, James.”

What barely constituted as a conversation between them trickled to a stop, lapsing into a somewhat stilted silence before—

“Bucky,” the brunet gritted out, forcing the words to surface, “call me Bucky.” He didn’t outright acknowledge Sam, or offer any other chance to elaborate, but at least he had made the effort to speak—he’d made the effort to be human.

“Okay then, Bucky. Easy done.” Sam accepted his response—or lack thereof—without complaint, taking it all in his stride flawlessly. He turned to Steve. “Ready to go?”

Steve, open-mouthed and staring at Bucky with a sort of wonder, nodded his confirmation. “Yeah, sure.” He cleaned his bowl in a few seconds and threw back a few gulps of bitter, black coffee that still reminded him of the black grinds they used to boil in the trenches all those years ago—anything else he tried to drink just tasted watered down.

Sam stood from the table in a slow, precise movement and swiped the dishes out of from under Steve’s nose, moving to drop them into the sink. Steve was unable to look away from Bucky for a few moments more, even as Sam feigned the need to retie his shoelaces to provide him with a small window of time to gather his wits. He noticed Bucky’s shoulders drop, his defensive stance relaxing as he came to the realisation that Sam wasn’t going to hurt him or Steve.

All he wanted to do was tell Bucky he was proud and that it was okay and soon everything had just gotten jumbled up into one big twisted mass of feelings. Steve closed his mouth with a clink of teeth, getting to his feet in an abrupt action that caused the chair to scrape on the hardwood floor. Bucky titled his head to the side at Steve’s sudden antics, a ghost of a faint, faint smile touching his lips as he chalked Steve’s jerky movements up to his doing. Steve offered him a breathless smile in return.

However, whatever glimpse of warmth that had started to appear in Bucky’s expression disappeared as Sam straightened in his peripheral vision, blessedly pointedly ignoring Steve’s flustered state and Bucky’s practised indifference.

Belatedly, Steve followed Sam out of his apartment, flashing another glance in Bucky’s direction before reaching to close the door. “I’ll be home soon, Buck.”

“Bye, Bucky. Nice meeting you,” Sam said again from behind Steve.

As the door swung shut in a wide arc Bucky lunged forward, eyes wide and his flesh arm outstretched, the naked urgency in his expression halting Steve in his tracks.

“What’sa matter?” he asked, already one foot in the door.

Bucky shook his head at Steve’s approach, signalling that he was okay, that it wasn’t anything serious. He lowered his arm, glancing downwards and biting his lip before raising his chin defiantly. It wasn’t a sign of hostility or aggression, rather an iron-willed determination.

“See you later, Steve.” Bucky said, nd then Bucky looked past him to Sam, “It was nice meeting you too, Sam.” Without another word he slipped back into the dark, safe recesses of the apartment, his footsteps silent.

Steve closed the door, resting his forehead on the door momentarily. A rushed breath of air escaped him, alleviating the overbearing pressure in his lungs. He pulled back at the touch of Sam’s hand on his shoulder, am uncontrollable smile pulling at his lips, carved into his soul.

Steve seemed to be asking, _He did good, didn’t he?_ And Sam’s answering smile—that sunshine-bright glint of teeth and a little gum, the total lack of judgement—said, _He did great_.

“C’mon,” Sam said, “I want to at least make it past one block before the sun rises. Times a-wasting.”

At the top of the stairs, their paces long and looping with energy, practically bursting with it, Sam turned to Steve. “Thanks for introducing me to him, it meant a lot.” His tone lightened, less serious. “I really thought you’d been chasing a ghost story for the past couple years, so is good to put a name to a face.”

Steve looked at Sam curiously, eyebrows knitted together at his choice of words. “It’s not like you haven’t met him before. You do remember D.C. don’t you?”

Sam laughed, the sound practically sparkling. “Of course I remember him,” he said. Sam caught Steve’s elbow midway down a flight of stairs, holding him in place again. “But that man was the Winter Soldier. The one I just met in your apartment was Bucky Barnes. It was a different person, Steve. That was your best friend in there, not an assassin or a memory, but someone with a history and a future.” He quieted, never breaking his focused gaze with Steve. “And that was my first time meeting the man you loved, so thank you for introducing us. Really.”

After a moment of stunned silence, Sam’s sober expression was replaced with a readily assuring smile, urging Steve down the remainder of the stairs. All the while Steve couldn’t stop thinking—couldn’t get over the simple fact—that if he had to name one thing he didn’t even get close to deserving in his too-long life, it would be Sam Wilson.

*

A few hours later, after a lengthy expedition through the streets of Brooklyn, Steve was exhilarated with the simple knowledge that he was just able to exist in his home, with Sam by his side and Bucky regaining pieces of himself bit-by-bit in a place he felt safe in.

He farewelled Sam when the sky was clear and bright, an endless stretch of blue above. He trekked back to his apartment building, jogging up the stairs and key thrust into the lock as he hurried to open it. Steve called out for Bucky as he pushed the door open, running a hand through his sweat-streaked hair, muscles shaking with the aftershocks of arduous exercise that was long overdue, despite his enhanced ability to stay in relatively superhuman shape.

Steve was greeted to an empty apartment, awash with golden sunlight, silent save for the muffled sounds emanating from the bedroom. “Bucky?” he repeated. He hastily untied his sneakers and placed them in a regimented fashion by the door, dropping his keys onto the island as he advanced towards the bedroom. A thin thread of anxiety started to unfurl, fraying at the ends at noticing the weird circumstances of his return.

“Buck?” His voice was a little desperate, a little raw.

Steve stopped at the bedroom door, hanging ajar, and cautiously pushed it open.

He wasn’t prepared for what he saw, not in the least—Bucky was on the floor, stripped down to loose drawstring sweatpants and hair tied into a messy ponytail. And he was balancing all his weight on two hands with his legs hovering over the ground, his body suspended in the air. Beads of sweat gathered on his bare skin in a thin, glistening sheen of moisture. Steve watched, transfixed, as he pulled his feet into a frog stand before lowering himself onto the ground with a gymnast-like grace. Bucky grunted when his knees hit the ground, rolling onto his back, his chest rising and falling as if he hadn’t dared to breathe moments before.

“How was it?” Bucky panted, stretching up to thread his fingers at the back of his head, cradling his skull.

“Good.” Steve managed to speak, but just barely.

Bucky rose onto his elbows at the distressed note in Steve’s voice, a creased line appearing between his eyebrows. Steve gulped, his gaze dropping over the sweat-wet length of Bucky’s body, the strength of his muscles and sinew honed and lean after countless years of expert training. It seemed like he’d been able to retain muscle mass and fitness level just as easily as Steve had—a fact which made his blood run uncomfortably hot under his collar.

“You okay, Steve?”

He knew he should’ve stopped looking but he couldn’t, not even if he tried. Because Bucky was lying half-naked on his bedroom floor, practically aglow with an expression of ease and happiness that Steve never thought he’d witness. Rays of sunlight streamed in through the window behind Bucky, the air thick with warmth and city-smells, his skin slick with sweat and hairstyle dishevelled. He was flush with exertion, a hint of red blooming across his roughly hewn features. Bucky looked rumpled and messy, like he’d just rolled out of bed, like he was completely at home in his surroundings.

Steve was conflicted between wanting to lurch forward to kiss him and wanting to hug him, to wrap him up in his arms and tell him that he was proud, so goddamn proud that it hurt.

“You just—” His mouth ran dry and Steve unconsciously licked his lips. “You just look real good.” He choked, stumbling over his words before admitting, “A little too good.” A faint pink blush spread over his cheeks and down his neck and shoulders.

The last remnant tension fled Bucky’s body at Steve’s words and his head rested back on the ground, arms relaxing low over the taut planes of his stomach. His smile was wide and peaceful as he allowed himself to admire the strong, clean lines of Steve’s profile—his blonde hair damp with sweat and body accentuated by the single, thin layer of fabric which separated skin from clothes.

“C’mere,” he said softly, extending his flesh arm towards Steve as an invitation.

Steve barely contemplated the thought, pulling his sweat-damp shirt over his head and closing the distance between him and Bucky in a matter of seconds. He dropped to his knees, already moving to stretch out beside Bucky—but a leg snaked around Steve’s hip and drew him into the V of Bucky’s thighs. He went gladly. Steve rested on his knees and elbows, braced on either side of Bucky’s head, holding his body over Bucky.

“I was proud of you today,” Steve said, dipping his head to nose along the side of Bucky’s jaw, the deep reverberations of Steve’s voice in his ear causing Bucky to tremble and quake. “You didn’t know how proud I was of you, Buck.”

Bucky tentatively looped his fingers in the waistband of Steve’s pants, sliding around to dig into the flesh of his back, urging him closer. Steve pressed his full weight of his lower body against Bucky now, hissing as Bucky’s legs wrapped around his waist, slotting their pelvises together.

“Buck,” Steve warned.

“Steve,” he teased, low and dangerous.

Their romantic endeavours hadn’t surpassed the waistband of their pants, and although Steve felt like he was thrumming with the constant need for _more_ , he knew his wants always came second to Bucky. His recovery was the most important thing in their lives right now, but they were allowed to be subjected to a little human selfishness every now and then—they deserved that small mercy at least.

But there were lapses in their fragile acceptance of the way things had to be between them. When it was warm enough they never slept in less than a pair of briefs between them. Sometimes Bucky felt like he would be driven mad, waking up to the familiar comforting weight of Steve under or above him, the mere feel of him overwhelming his very senses. He hadn’t felt that faint stirring of desire in decades—a restlessness burring under his skin, a longing to touch Steve but knowing that he couldn’t, that he would reject Bucky’s advances under the pretences of his firmly-held moral code.

Sometimes Steve felt the same way too—in between intermittent glances to Bucky when he was changing, or waking up to an all-too familiar yearning, knowing he shouldn’t allow his hands to linger on Bucky any longer in the shower but doing so anyway. But as much as he craved that simple need to touch and taste and feel everything, Steve knew he couldn’t do that too Bucky.

Bucky’s mind wasn’t completely whole, and although his thoughts were fast approaching logical processes, Steve couldn’t take stomach the thought of taking advantage of him. Not when Bucky looked at him with almost a child-like naïvety, hands shaking and unable to form a coherent sentence beyond repeating Steve’s name, over and over again. He had been debased, stripped of all reasonability, understanding of social norms, and common human needs.

But it was healing, time having mended the abuse he’d sustained over a million different lifetimes. Steve had spent over twenty years loving Bucky from afar, and then seventy loving him in death, but for nearly the past three years he’d finally been able to exercise that love. It was an emotion rather than a memory now—a possibility rather than a regret.

“Steve,” Bucky said again, lips brushing his cheek. “It’s okay, I choose this.”

“Choose what?” He had to hear it; he needed to be sure this was exactly what he wanted.

“Not sex,” he said, a frown briefly twisting his features, but it quickly replaced with his relaxed ease of before. “But more than kissing, more than wanting to touch you but not being able to. I know how I feel about you, Steven Grant Rogers, and it’s my decision to act on those feelings.”

“Are you sure?” Steve hated the edge of irritation that soured Bucky’s expression, but he needed to be careful. He didn’t want to trigger anything that would lead to irreparable damage of Bucky’s fragile psyche, or impede upon his ambiguous set of established boundaries. He didn’t want to hurt or betray that trust Bucky had placed in him.

“It’s my choice, Steve. Not his or yours or anyone else’s. _Mine_.” Bucky’s voice was unflinchingly hard; his gaze a steady and clear blue on Steve’s own. “I can assure you it’s my choice and mine alone.”

Steve nodded, swallowing thickly. “Okay, okay, I believe you.” He leaned down to steal a kiss from Bucky, trying to soften the hard line of his mouth and the crease between his eyebrows, erase all evidence of hurt from him.

“I believe you, Buck.” Steve said against his skin in a whisper, a promise. “I trust you.” He continued laying reverential kisses to Bucky’s face, over his eyelids and cheeks and forehead, the fleshy part of his upper lip and the rounded curve of his jaw. He tried to make up for every seed of doubt he’d implanted in Bucky’s mind, every cold rebuttal or stinging rejection, even if it was the right thing to do then.

Soon he felt the thread of tension in Bucky’s posture waver before disappearing entirely. Bucky’s arms wrapped around Steve’s shoulders, legs also tightening their hold on his waist. Steve pulled back to gauge Bucky’s emotions—open, tremoring, vulnerable—once and then Bucky was surging upwards, straining to claim Steve’s lips. His intention weren’t to be slow, or gentle, and instead it was rough and demanding.

Steve felt inadequate, because he was never one to initiate anything, and he could hardly be called anything close to somewhat experienced in these types of situations. But it didn’t matter to Bucky, not at all, because it was _Steve._ Nothing in the world could take away from the fact he was the anchor in Bucky’s storm; the constant amongst variables; the centre of his universe—had been for years and years and years.

Bucky tilted his head for a better angle, tongue teasing the seam of his mouth, working it open. Steve initially resisted, unwilling to take it to the next level, but soon Bucky canted his hips up, eliciting a gasp from Steve that he hoped wasn’t as desperate as he thought it sounded. Steve’s mouth parted at the contact of their hips, giving Bucky an inch that he took for a mile.

It was hot and wet and filthy, lacking all prior inhibitions that Steve can’t even care to be embarrassed about—the sloppy way he slanted his lips against Bucky’s, practically licking his way into the other man’s mouth, how greedy he was in trying to taste all of Bucky at once.

Again, Bucky hitched his legs higher on Steve’s waist, groaning low and animalistic in the back of his throat. The sound shocked them both—Steve chastised, Bucky gleeful—but the grin slipped from Bucky’s lips as Steve’s hips moved forward in an experimental roll. Metal and flesh fingers grasped the roots of his hair without relent, coaxing Steve into a torturous rhythm he too could match with vigour. Their collective worlds focused on the warm slide of their tongues, the melding of their lips and the rough grazing of stubble.

It wasn’t nearly enough for both of their long-repressed desires, but it would suffice for now.

They kissed until time was rendered a vague concept, until there was a strain between Steve’s shoulders and his elbows ached from resting on the hardwood floor. Bucky kept asking for more, kept whittling down Steve’s defences until he was a quivering mass, like a coil that was ready to snap. Steve kept trying to stem his insistence, to taper his efforts into something more intimate and chaste, but then Bucky was pushing and claiming and _grinding_ and suddenly Steve can’t remember how to breathe.

“Stop holding back,” Bucky said once, breaking the connection between them even as Steve trailed a line of fast, unskilled kisses down his neck. Even as he rolled onto one elbow to palm his shoulder, sliding his fingers over his neck, holding him in place. “Jesus, I want this Steve,” he panted, “I want this. I want _you_.”

Steve alleviated some of his weight from Bucky to kiss his neck, allowing him adequate room to move, and Bucky saw his chance—and quickly took it. Bucky used all the strength he had left to push himself off the ground and shove Steve onto his back forcefully, a little too eager in his actions as he rushed to sit astride Steve. Wide-eyed and startled, Steve flushed red at Bucky’s impatient insistence, ashamed with the fact that he was so pleased with the fact that Bucky’s seeming desire matched his in magnitude. Bucky’s gaze lingered on Steve’s mouth, kiss-red and swollen, staring at the trembling man under his hands like he couldn’t believe he was quite real.

“You okay?” Steve asked, unable to understand how he could articulate _anything_ at this point.

“I don’t—” His hands slid over the planes and ridges of his chest, trying to memorise every rise and dip of Steve’s body—to catalogue every point which made him gasp or shudder—out of fear that he would lose this memory too. And he didn’t want to forget, he never wanted to wake up to the shaking, sepia-toned images of a man pressed to him in a sun-drenched apartment, wanting to kiss him but unable to recall why. HYDRA had taken Steve from him once, but Bucky wasn’t going to let them take him again without putting up a decent fight.

“You don’t what, Buck?” Steve asked gently, breaking Bucky out of his reverie. Steve’s large fingers kneaded the flesh of Bucky’s thighs through his sweatpants, offering a source of constant pressure—a steady point which Bucky could focus on. He lets his hand rest there, over skin and bone and muscle, setting his nerves alight more so than their previous bout of kissing did. Although Steve doesn’t push any further—not yet.

Bucky’s fingers drifted over Steve’s stomach, hesitant and light. He noticed how his touch elicited a trail of goosebumps along Steve’s skin—a shaky gasp followed, a fire burning low and insistent in Steve—but instead he lingered. Bucky stilled, the intention to make Steve’s body arch and contort with every motion of his tongue and hands and mouth momentarily forgotten. The white noise which filled his brain trickled to a stilting halt, deft fingers hovering on Steve’s abdomen, over the small, round fraction of discoloured skin.

The memory was unpleasant, intrusive—the whirr of a strong aerial engine, fighting a man clad in blue and red and white, his world narrowed down to the invigorating thrum of pain in his veins. A plead from a man who was a number rather than a name, a bid for peace which went on unnoticed, ignored—

_Please don’t make me do this._

A hand closed over Bucky’s suddenly, the feeling of broad, slightly damp fingers gripping his own.

Steve smiled at him, one part sad, one part broken, but the whole of it forgiving.

Bucky could barely come to terms with half of the things he did, let alone forgive himself for it. He hated what he did to Steve, to Sam, to everyone before and after and in between. He couldn’t rectify the problems he’d created or the cracks that would forever remain in his soul no matter how much times he tried to fill it in with plaster, but learning that he could repent—and by God he swore he would never stop repenting—for his sins maybe was enough.

Something that had been strung taut between him and Steve eased, slackened. The defensive hitch of Bucky’s shoulders dropped and his facial features relaxed into an almost wounded expression—eyes reflective instead of a fathomless blankness, his lower lip trembling, his breath quivering.

Upon seeing the imperceptible signs of Bucky’s resolve crack, Steve pushed himself up on his hands to close the distance between them. He dipped his mouth to brush Bucky’s, barely a whisper of hair-thin space separating them, asking Bucky for permission. Bucky nodded after a beat, his movements a little jerky and his hair masking half his face, but his eyes were clear and lucid.

The kiss was slow, languid, an intimate melding of lips. Steve didn’t act on the intention to tease or stoke the embers of desire which still burned within them, but to reassure, to soothe. To build the fragments of Bucky from the ground up, reaching for what he could and piecing him back together.

Panting heavily, Bucky was forced to pull away soon enough—it was too much, the touch gentle to the point of poignancy. Bucky turned his head, maintaining contact but refusing to kiss Steve again. He pressed their foreheads together as he nuzzled closer, noses bumping, seeking comfort he didn’t think he deserved.

“How ‘bout we take a shower? Huh?” Steve prompted, soft and patient.

Bucky breathed deeply, once in and out, before nodding. He rolled off Steve in an aborted movement, a whimper caught in his throat at the very loss of him—touch, taste, sight. Some days it felt like he needed to maintain contact with Steve, a closeness that went beyond physical pleasure, as if he dared to let go he would lose him again, forever. But Steve was there to catch him, he always there—a hand extended, a firm grip curling around Bucky’s wrist as he led him to the bathroom.

In an echo of their first shower together, in that ramshackle French bathroom, Steve moved to take silent care of Bucky without complaint. They stood close, Bucky grasping at the flesh of Steve’s hips, sliding around to his back, resting his face in the crook of his neck. Steve’s fingers ran over the crown of Bucky’s head swiftly, one hand pressed to a pale, scarred shoulder blade to steady him as he worked the hair tie loose, shaking his thick, unwashed hair free.

Bucky smelt worse than usual due to the stink of still-wet sweat which coated his skin, but Steve barely noticed. Because the man beneath his hands was quivering and warm and real—he was Bucky, returned alive from death and ice and torture.

He crooked his deft fingers into Bucky’s waistband—a nod issuing permission for Steve to continue—and stripped him off his sweatpants, feeling Bucky’s grip alternate to his head, gripping the short blond hair. Steve moved to drop trou, kissing Bucky’s cheek chastely before opening the shower door to start running a stream of water. Steve set to adjusting the temperature as he felt Bucky’s mouth graze his shoulder, tracing wet, lazy patterns over his skin. He shivered at the touch, unable to help himself, succeeding in the fleeting grin pressed to the base of his neck.

Once he deemed the water appropriate—he learned Bucky preferred it hot, just enough to leave his skin reddened and tender—Steve urged Bucky inside with him before closing the door behind them. Bucky had seemed to regain some form of coherency since his episode on the bedroom floor, and that clouded haze of hurt and confusion had cleared from his eyes. Steve kept him close anyway.

He took a step back until he hit the wall, content in allowing Bucky to stand fully under the showerhead as he lingered on the edges. Bucky eyelids shuttered to a close, his mouth opening as he entered the spray of water, completely wetting his hair to a darker shade of brown, trickling over his face in diamond-bright rivulets. A moan slipped past his lips at the sensation—and Steve’s breath caught, his heartbeat racing.

Sometimes it was like Bucky didn’t even remember what a proper shower felt like, to be lulled into a blissfully comfortable state under the constant pressure of warm water and enveloped in steam. Bucky ran his hands over his face, smoothing his dark hair back over his forehead almost as an afterthought, his fingers tangling with Steve’s at the base of Bucky’s skull.

His eyes opened, mirthful and bright, his mouth curving into a remnant of the past Bucky’s smile.

The question which had been forming on Steve’s lips was ultimately silenced as Bucky leaned forward to kiss him, sealing their mouths together in a water-slick embrace. Whereas before he had kissed with heat, edged with a frantic desperation to seek everything he had been denied in Steve’s offer of _more_ , now it was controlled—just as demanding, but with real meaning. He didn’t mean to lose himself again, to fall back into the dark, fathomless pit of his memories—instead he wanted to make this feel good for Steve.

Bucky cupped the back of Steve’s head with his flesh hand, his metal arm braced against the wall for support.  He kissed harder, still close-mouthed and wet, but waiting for Steve to give. He gripped Steve’s hair by the roots, pulling softly, urging him on. Bucky adjusted the angle of his head, memorising the press of Steve’s lips to his own with a sort of reverence that elicited a small, breathy gasp from Steve.

And then— _finally_ —Steve relented—his mouth parting as he moved to suck on Bucky’s lower lip, seeking access past the seam of his mouth, his fingernails marking Bucky’s skin with matching half-moon imprints on both sides of his waist.

Steve’s hands skimmed from his lean hips up, to the breadth of his shoulder and the toned muscle of his arms. He tried to pull Bucky closer but his hands slipped on his wet skin and then he was surging forward. He matched the force of Bucky’s kiss, mouths slanted over one another and tongues forcing their mouths to open wider. Steve—wild with lust he rarely experienced as self-constraint usually playing a part in his denied intimacy—allowed a hint of teeth to sink into Bucky’s lip again, sucking on the plump flesh. Bucky shivered, momentarily faltering in his actions at Steve’s assertion of dominance, shaking with the thought that Steve was claiming Bucky in some way.

The kiss deepened, a ravenous hunger now replacing their prior careful intimacy. It was a messy, demanding, _erotic_ clash of mouths that made Steve’s mind go completely blank for a moment, made his fingers tremble. Faintly, Bucky registered the subtle yet significant change in Steve’s demeanour, his usual self-constraint slipping, a fissure of cracks spreading throughout his mask of rigid discipline and rationality. He needed more, _wanted_ more—knowing he was willing to give everything he had for Steve, to Steve.

Bucky pressed closer to him, a definitive lack of space between their bodies, the expanse of naked, wet skin sliding together. Steve arched into Bucky’s touch, gasping loudly—the sound echoing throughout the hushed atmosphere of the room. His nerve endings were set ablaze with the mere sensation of Bucky so close, laid raw and trembling beneath his hands and mouth and tongue. Steve’s fingers dipped, gripping the firm flesh of his lower backside to pull him closer, higher.

The press of lips was hard, furious, bruising—it was all take and no give, an even match of wits. Bucky would surge forward again, their teeth clanking together as he tried to fuse himself to Steve at every possible point of human contact. And Steve would hold him tighter, kiss him open and wet and lacking all inhibitions, like he’d never been allowed to act on greedy, base impulses before.

Bucky abandoned Steve’s mouth, smiling at how his actions left the blond man swaying forward, searching for Bucky’s mouth on instinct. He heard a whimper, a cry of protest, and so Bucky nudged his face against Steve’s, pressing a quick kiss to his lips as appeasement. He used his secure grip in Steve’s hair to manoeuvre his head sideways, and Steve compliantly offered his neck. Trailing a line down the smooth column of muscle, kisses brand-hot even as the scalding water had dulled their senses long ago, Bucky paid reverential attention to where Steve was most sensitive. He sucked the flesh until it bruised, skin darkening with his efforts, spurred on by the involuntary noises that were wrenched from Steve’s throat.

Bucky marvelled at how Steve was making those sounds because of him—how he was reduced to a unsteady mass of pained moans and beautiful lapses in restraint because of _him_. He mouthed over Steve’s collarbone, sneaking a glance at his expression—a pinch between his eyebrows, lips parted breathlessly—before biting down gently. Steve’s broken gasp of pleasure was sharp and sudden—the very sound reverberating through Bucky, trilling in his blood—and his back bowed almost instantly, fingernails scraping a road map of scratches over Bucky’s back. He hissed through his teeth—not out of pain, but in need to emote his overwhelming emotions somehow—and rose up to kiss Steve roughly, without finesse or technique but driven by the burn of a soul-deep fire.

Bucky never wanted to stop hearing Steve making those wrecked sounds—he never wanted to forget the whimpers and gasps and moans, of which places on his body elicited such a reaction. The feeling burning in his bones, in his marrow, he soon broke the kiss. With a determined lift to his chin, Bucky’s flesh hand splayed across Steve’s chest and he pushed him roughly back against the wall.

For one terrifying second Steve thought he’d lost Bucky—that he’d suddenly realised he didn’t want this or an underlying trigger just _clicked_ in his brain. Instead, Steve looked through his water-damp lashes at Bucky—strands of dark hair dangling over his face, his mouth impossibly red and pupils blown—to see his expression was earnest, vulnerable.

And then Bucky slid down Steve’s body to sit on his knees, never once breaking eye contact, the intention of his actions clear.

“You don’t have to, Buck,” Steve was saying in a rush. “You don’t owe me that, you don’t—”

“I want to,” he stated, gazing evenly up at Steve as if he expected a fight.

Steve knew not to ask twice, that once was enough to confirm Bucky;’ actions.

At Steve’s slight nod of permission Bucky dropped his gaze, his façade of calm evaporating. Bucky’s  hands drifted downwards from his hipbones, fingertips running lightly over his thighs in a drawn-out manner, noticing the tremor which rolled throughout his body. He swallowed once before glancing upwards at Steve—sucking in a pointed breath at how utterly wrecked he looked, like he wanted to haul Bucky up and kiss him senseless, yet he didn’t.

He watched with rapt attention as Bucky’s head dipped forward, taking Steve fully in his mouth. Bucky couldn’t remember ever doing something like this before—the details of his time as the Winter Soldier were never explicit, but he had a fair grasp of the concept. But whatever clinical memories he’d had of sex paled in comparison to this, to Steve. Because now it was warmth and desire and comfort, this was _wanting_ —this was the ability to feel human after decades of oppression.

It was almost liberating, to be perceived as more than an object. To depend on someone else, to have thoughts and emotions that were his own—that was what his existence had been absent of.

Bucky glanced up once to gauge Steve’s emotional state—if he was enjoying this, if it felt good—and was half-surprised, half-thrilled with what he saw—Steve’s mouth hung open, his chest expanding in an irregular pattern of laboured pants, staring down at Bucky wordlessly. Hopelessly.

Bucky registered the tightening of Steve’s grip in his hair, the sharp intake of breath, and the sound of a stuttered moan amidst the rush of pouring water. He twisted his head to the side, paying close attention to how Steve’s hips bucked forward on pure instinct. Bucky smiled at the blond man’s reaction, testing another alternative angle of his mouth and tongue.

A tongue darted between Steve’s lips as he watched the sensual movements of Bucky’s mouth over the length of him. The back of Steve’s head hit the tiled shower wall as an unmistakable pressure built in the base of his spine, a loud groan echoing through the room. Steve’s face was contorted in a study in bliss—and the image of it spurred Bucky onwards, the cant of his head meeting Steve’s shallow thrusts. He sucked harder, with a light graze of teeth, from root to tip and—

Steve’s eyelids shuttered to a close as his orgasm fast approached, the feeling growing from his curled toes and rolling through him upwards, consuming him in its intensity. Bucky didn’t expect Steve to be so vocal, so unabashed, but he still revelled in the almost violent cry that was pulled deep from Steve’s chest.

Flesh pounded against tiles soundly as Steve’s head snapped back as his release hit him hard, powerful in nature. Steve’s whole world seemed to fade and blur, reduced to the mere, singular feel of Bucky’s mouth wrapped around him, hips stuttering forward once, twice more.

Bucky waited until Steve slowly drifted down from his high, fingers flexing in his hair as Bucky prolonged the quivering aftershocks of Steve’s fast-dissipating arousal. Steve whimpered brokenly as Bucky leaned back on his haunches, pulling away until his mouth was devoid of Steve. He was still a little weak—more vulnerable than Bucky had ever seen him, that tender, beating, raw inside of a man who seemed to think the entire world rested on his shoulders.

Steve reached for him, just needing Bucky to be close, to know that he was real. Bucky acquiesced—not like it required any logical thought processes. Bucky’s expression was softer around the edges, the fire-hot spark of desire still burning within him, heat pooled low in his groin, but he was content with evoking any form of pleasure from Steve.

A pair of open, breathless lips ghosted over Bucky’s mouth, his forehead pressed firmly to Steve’s as their bodies fit together in a water-slick embrace that was absent of all space, of all doubt. Bucky felt a lazy grin against the skin of his cheek, Steve’s nose bumping his, burrowing into his warmth.

“Steve?”

“Hmm?” He hummed.

But he couldn’t say the words, and instead the sentence lodged in his throat, unable to surface.

Despite the pang of unsaid confessions, knowing the remnant of fear and that the emotion was beat out of Bucky long ago remained, Steve didn’t show an outward expression of being too fazed. Not to appease Bucky’s mounting feeling of inadequacy—already pulling away from Steve, an excuse forming in his mind—but to elicit the same rush of gasped pleasure Bucky had succeeded in doing before.

Steve’s hands trailed lower, to Bucky’s lean hips and abdomen, skimming idly over Bucky’s skin but intent in purpose. He pressed one more reassuring—yet still decidedly intimate—kiss to Bucky’s lips before his deft artist’s hands grasped him in a soft hold. Steve swallowed every quiet moan and gasp as his fist moved in fast, purposeful pumps, bringing Bucky to the dangerous edge of something so base and so human it almost overwhelmed him completely.

Bucky didn’t know his head had fallen into the waiting cradle of Steve’s neck until the blond man’s other hand came to rest protectively over his head, fingers curling in a catch of dark hair. And then Bucky gasped in the smallest utterance of sound, his mouth open over Steve’s collarbone and fingers digging into the flesh of a golden bicep. He _clung_ to Steve. A spurt of warmth spilled across Steve’s hand, and he stroked Bucky through the last, shaking dredges of his release, and he washed them both clean before placing a kiss atop Bucky’s forehead.

Afterwards, Bucky mused over how he had been taught that emotional attachment was a weakness, something that could be used to break or shatter, but right now—in this very moment—Bucky knew that nothing could compare. Not when he was able to place complete faith and trust in Steve and know that any pain or heartache that he would endure in the future would be rendered insignificant in retrospect to _now_.

Yes, there was a possibility it would eventually destroy them both, but they were with each other till the end of the line—whether it be as friends or enemies, lovers or colleagues, separated or together.

Some moments you held onto even long after everything else had faded and withered into dust, a relic of pure, unalloyed emotion—and this was one of them.

Bucky didn’t notice when the water cut off, but he did when Steve gathered Bucky close and towelled him dry with an unspoken tenderness, intimate beyond comprehensible words. Steve directed Bucky towards their bed, their movements lacking in determination and everything a little fuzzy around the edges, vaporous where it was normally solid.

Steve still acted as Bucky’s source of sturdy, reliable strength amidst his crumbling façade of calm, yet now he was braving the gentle after-shower of snowflakes rather than the full force of the storm with him.

The sheets were cool and smooth against Bucky’s skin, but when he slipped into bed he was cold. Empty. Alone. Curling in on himself, Bucky reached behind him with an outstretched hand, blindly grasping for Steve. It was only when Steve followed Bucky into bed and his broad, all-encompassing touch returned that the hollowed-out cavity in his chest no longer ached.

Bucky had lived with that feeling three lives over—once ignoring it, next just barely bearing it, and then not being able to remember it at all. But now, maybe fourth and final time, he knew what the feeling was— _Steve_. And he knew what it meant—longing for the weight and feeling of his best friend, his leader, his lover. And what it entailed—relying on someone other than himself for once.

Steve enveloped Bucky whole, knees slotted behind his and back pressed to Bucky’s chest, an arm drawing him backwards into his embrace. Even though he would never admit it, Bucky needed Steve to do this sometimes, he needed to be protected and held close. He and Steve never knew how to ask for it—and maybe Bucky never really would, but at least they were able to offer what they could.

Steve brushed the damp hair from Bucky’s head in the bright glow of midday; the apartment painted in warm earth tones. Steve kissed the angular slope of his jaw chastely before pressing a fond smile into the skin of Bucky’s ear, almost indulgent in his worship of Bucky.

Bucky turned his head, smiling also as Steve dipped forward to kiss him, closemouthed and tender.

*

It wasn’t long before the gentleness of their kisses were replaced with something rougher, harder, more desperate. Bucky needed to be touched—to be claimed—so much his fingers shook, and he knew that sinking his teeth into Steve’s bottom lip bordered on the point of pain. That his metal fingers left bruises he would regret later, but now he just needed to _feel_.

“Steve,” Bucky gasped amidst the dark, a plea for more.

In the night-dim light of their bedroom, Steve stared at the silhouette of Bucky, his lean frame pressed to the wall Steve had pinned him to before. He knew a thread of nervous, cagey energy had been thrumming through Bucky’s veins for the past few days.

Rest was scarce, and control over his emotions was even scarcer still. Bucky needed to exercise that tension in an act of physical exertion rather than meditation or whatever Sam had begun to teach him.

But, Steve had always struggled with toeing certain lines that involved morality.

“Buck,” Steve started, bending backwards to allow him room to speak. However, a groan slipped from his lips as Bucky instinctively followed the line of his body, lips finding the soft flesh of his neck and sucking. The slick slide of a tongue, a light graze of teeth was enough to make Steve keen forward. He thrust his arm out to use the wall to support his weight, his other hand leaving half-moon imprints on the bare skin of Bucky’s back.

“Buck, wait,” Steve protested weakly, “we gotta talk first.”

“We don’t.”

Steve frowned at the gravelly, determined edge to Bucky’s voice and bought his hand up to Bucky’s chest, pushing him backwards softly. The flash of irritation that crossed Bucky’s expressions hardened his resolve—Steve needed to know they were doing this for the right reasons, not just for a temporary release.

“Do you need to ask?” Bucky demanded, palming the neglected side of Steve’s neck, fingers brushing the short bristles of the base of his hairline.

Steve refused to shiver at the sensation, instead focusing on the arrogant life to Bucky’s chin. “I’m not going to do anything that—”

“I want too, okay?”

Steve opened his mouth to enquire for an obligatory assurance, but the wounded, open look in Bucky’s eyes alerted him to the fact this argument was already over—not that it had already been one to being with. He needed to stop insisting upon asking when he already knew the answer to the question.

“Got it.” He said, smiling at an errant thought which passed through his mind.

Bucky’s brows furrowed in confusion.

Steve just shook his head in reply. _Look how far you’ve come_ , he wanted to say. _You’re capable of making your own decisions and being your own person. You’re not a number or a ghost. Buck, you’re a person._ But he knew now was not the time for professions of undying love—that privilege was reserved for softer, more fragile moments when the entire axis of the world rested on them alone.

“Steve,” Bucky said, dropping his defensive stance and the pitch of his tone alike.

“Yeah?”

Bucky’s hand slid from Steve’s neck to his chest, and down, down, down. His touch slowed at the buttons of his khakis, teasing the fastenings open at a tantalisingly unhurried pace. Steve sucked air in between his parted lips; the path of Bucky’s fingertips eliciting a trail of fire along his skin—shirts had been abandoned long ago, only pants and a pair of briefs remained.

“I want to do everything with you,” Bucky said in a low voice, his breath warm on Steve’s neck. His hand passed the boundary of Steve’s waistband, grasping him in a clumsy hold that did not deter Steve in the least, and after a few purposeful strokes Steve could barely restrain himself and—

He surged forward, crashing his mouth to Bucky’s, hot and wet and sloppy. Bucky made an appreciative noise in the back of his throat, matching Steve’s eagerness with fervour. Skin contact offered little reprieve from the infuriating need that burned within them, the feeling even more visceral, more selfish than it had ever been before.

“Bed?”

“Bed.”

Their conjoined efforts soon allowed them to shuffle towards the said bed without breaking contact, although it involved a number of awkward limbs colliding when the back of Steve’s knees hit the mattress, and he pulled him down with him. Steve whispered an apology at knocking Bucky’s ministrations aside—for stopping it all together and denying himself and Bucky the pleasure—and kissed Bucky quickly.

But soon the atmosphere had shifted from a disrupted quiet to a volatile crackle of electricity. It was dangerous and frightening and a million other things—but Steve knew that waiting for a perfect moment would never be an option for both of them. All he and Bucky had was the here and now.

And Steve knew he needed to make the most of their salvaged lives when he still had the chance—not for the sake of just doing it, but because he simply _could_. For once, it seemed the odds were in their favour—there were no prejudicial time periods, wars, or secret, manipulative organisations to control them anymore.

At first, Steve kissed Bucky slowly. Tenderly. Indulgently. He rolled Bucky onto his back, bracing his weight over the brunet. Their pelvises slotted together, granting immensely gratifying friction. Steve tried to still the instinctual movements of his hips, but his actions only stoked the embers of desire which had coiled low in his abdomen. What had once been measured and thoughtful was steadily growing intense and more focused on an important future aim.

Bucky’s legs bracketed Steve’s thighs above him, and he clenched them together at the first hint of fervour in Steve’s kiss. His hips bucked forward without his direction, his resolve rapidly disintegrating. Bucky grasped at the muscled flesh of Steve’s back, holding on to the solid warmth of him as his hips moved against Steve’s—who soon matched the rhythm with a strangled half-moan.

Steve’s hand fisted in Bucky’s thick hair, drawing him closer, pressing down harder. The heat of it was unbearable, the drag of fingertips over hypersensitive skin, and the constant, unquenchable need for more and _more_. But where he was still unable to ask for such things, Bucky had no qualms on the subject. He relied on the strength of his metal arm to push Steve onto his back, straddling him almost instantly.

Steve reached out for him as Bucky started to grind down in tight, measured circles. His head fell backwards onto the rumpled sheets, his tanned neck bared. The groan that escaped Steve’s mouth was animal in origin, overwhelmed with the very sensation of Bucky so close, moving against him in rough actions that could be considered downright erotic. And then Bucky levered his weight forward, hands resting on Steve’s chest for support and the new, sudden angle caused Steve’s head to snap up, arching off the bed.

Vaguely, Steve registered Bucky’s incoherent mumble to wait.

His eyelids shuttering to a close, Steve fell back onto the mattress, unable to do more than utter wrecked groans of pleasure. A current of electricity skated along Steve’s spine, liquid heat settling low in his stomach. He was panting, his hands fisted tightly in the bedsheets above his head. Steve was loud—sharp gasps and deep groans--and he didn’t even consider quieting himself at the way Bucky looked at him, eyes half-lidded but searing. And Bucky wasn’t faring any better—his legs trembling with every thrust, his bottom lip caught between his teeth in an attempt to restrain the litany of stuttered moans that spilled from him.

“Bucky,” Steve managed to articulate, although it was no more than a breathy, helpless moan, “we need to stop soon or…”

Bucky nodded vigorously, his throat having long run dry. He slowed his efforts, still unable to fully stop chasing that steady build of pressure and heat, the feel of Steve under him almost mesmerising. It had been years, decades, since he had been able to feel without fear of pain or danger lingering at the edges of his conscience. He was in full control of his emotions and his body—even if every graze of fingernails down his back or a palm curving over his hip sent him spurring forward into the waiting abyss.

Steve pushed himself onto his hands, sitting up so close Bucky’s lips ghosted over his. His senses were overwrought and balancing on the delicate precipice of control and wild abandon, so he tried breathing deeply for a few seconds. Trying to find a quick reprieve from his tumultuous thoughts.

Steve opened his eyes to see the fond lift to Bucky’s kiss-swollen mouth, the actions of his hips finally having settled. Something seemed to shift around them, losing the heady ache of want as a more intimate, fragile calm settled between them. Unable to help himself, Steve cupped Bucky’s face one-handed, his thumb running over the sharp point of his cheekbone, dipping to trace his succulent lips. Bucky’s inhale was sharp and shaking, both their chests rising and falling in frantic heaves.

As if to not ruin the moment, Steve leaned forward to rest his forehead against Bucky’s. Although he was thrumming with a desire to pull Bucky apart and put him back together with his tongue, lips, and hands, he was content in his actions. Bucky seemed to sigh softly, his body fully relaxing as the last taut line of tension was severed by Steve’s affectionate touch.

Steve smiled as he caught Bucky’s gaze, breathing a quiet laugh to dissuade from the overwhelming lodge of emotion that caught in his throat. Bucky’s arms tightened around Steve’s shoulders in response, pulling him impossibly closer before releasing.

“Ready?” Steve asked softly.

Bucky nodded again, not trusting himself to speak.

Steve moved to lie back down on some ridiculous notion that Bucky didn’t want to be comforted by the weight of his body—that maybe he didn’t want to be completely cocooned by the mere feel of everything that made Steve—and so Bucky stopped him. Confusion flitted across Steve’s expression, his mouth opening before clamping shut. Bucky offered him a watery smile—the words still wouldn’t come—before rolling off Steve. Laying arm-to-arm, he stripped off his briefs and waited for Steve to catch up with the meaning behind his actions.

Propped on one elbow, the tightness of Steve’s jaw eased as he realised what Bucky wanted to do. He kicked off his remaining clothes with a childlike grace that caused Bucky to laugh under his breath, his hand resting on Steve’s bicep once he was completely naked.

Steve kissed him once—open-mouthed and purposeful, a promise—before positioning his large, over-warm body over Bucky’s. He focused his attention on reading Bucky’s reaction, his trained gaze searching for any sign of discomfort or fear. Steve was worried that this would push Bucky over an edge he had carefully skirted over the past months, so his movements remained methodical, unhurried.

However, Bucky’s hands soon slid up Steve’s arms to his shoulders, fingernails imprinting on his skin, adding to the collection of half-formed bruises and reddened marks of passion. Bucky urged Steve on, his legs wrapping around his waist in a loose hold, the angle causing Steve’s weight to bear down on him at a blinding point of contact.

And Bucky wanted to be pushed back into the mattress, he wanted to be anchored by Steve’s heavy, familiar weight, he wanted to feel safe and protected. He urged Steve forward into the cradle of his legs, needing to feel the slide of their bodies, the lack of air between them. The mere sensation of Steve’s bulk above Bucky immediately grounded him, connected the threads of humanity that had unravelled in his mind as clarity replaced space.

Steve squeezed his eyes shut at the sensation of touch, at how close he was to crossing that line and finally claiming Bucky as his. He glanced at Bucky for the last time, and his answering nod of trembling permission was all it took.

A tight ring of resistance, a burn that forced Steve to regulate his breathing to allow Bucky time to adjust. He grunted with the effort to keep still, until he was pushing forward at the feeling of tension slowly dissipating from Bucky’s muscles. And with a gasp, overwhelmed with heat and taste and touch, Steve was bonded, connected to Bucky in every way it counted. Bucky rose upwards—legs hitching higher on Steve’s back, locked into place—and kissed him with earnest, swallowing a string of broken, helpless moans.

The world faded into a nonsensical landscape of blurred tones and indistinct shapes, leaving the two of them alone. Steve started to move, almost without coherent thought. The first thrusts were shallow and experimental, setting an unsteady pace which frayed his raw nerves. The background of noise was filled only with gasping pleas, moans ripped from throats and terms of endearments whispered against skin.

Bucky could only stutter intermittent moans as all-consuming pleasure raced through him, a blinding-hot wave of it that left him a soundless mass of quivering nerves in its wake. He writhed against Steve, eliciting an involuntary jerk of Steve’s hips that caused Bucky to arch off the mattress, absolutely no space left between them.

Steve groaned without inhibitions, quickening his pace, heat unfurling low in his stomach. He knew he wouldn’t last long—but it looked like Bucky wasn’t too far behind, his breathing uneven and fingernails rhythmically digging into Steve’s skin with every thrust.

Bucky dared to glance at the man above him, the muscles flexing in his arms as Steve hovered him, trying to maintain a steady pace, one they both could enjoy. His golden skin was slick with sweat, with the exertion of having to rein in his emotions and focus solely on the heat and feel of Bucky. Fire travelled beneath his skin, threatening to engulf him as Steve keened forward, uttering a stuttered gasp of pleasure. Every motion of hips was punctuated by a drawn moan, the sound reverberating throughout Bucky, sending him further and further to that edge of all-encompassing bliss.

But when Steve whispered Bucky’s name reverentially, in a quiet, wrecked plea that was meant for him and him alone, Bucky’s climax was sudden and devastating. His breathing fractured, and he was silent save for the broken moan that slipped past his parted mouth, his muscles straining, his body bowed.

Bucky’s whole consciousness was filled with nothing but the stalwart pressure of Steve against him, on top of him, moving without logical thought. He was completely lost to anything that wasn’t Steve, grasping onto the warm flesh of his back and legs tightening. Bucky wished he was able to stay here, in this moment, forever.

Spurred on by Bucky’s silent but nonetheless intense peak of pleasure, Steve took him deep and hard, and Bucky was unable to meet the frantic cant of his hips. His orgasm ripped through him without relent, a white-hot thunderclap of pleasure that curled his toes and blurred the edges of his vision. He bent forward, his entire body plastered to Bucky’s at every point of contact. Ever last dredge of pleasure was wringed from him, leaving him sated and overwrought, sweat-slick skin pressed flush to the length of Bucky.

Steve shuddered against Bucky, the last rushed breath of air escaping from his chest. He drifted down from the high of his pleasure slowly, enveloped in everything that made Bucky—his sweat-wet skin, the damp tendrils of his dark hair curling against Steve’s cheek, cradling his heavy weight against him.

With a gentleness that still surprised Bucky, Steve pulled away from him, rolling onto his side. Bucky followed the path of Steve’s body, still needing to maintain as much contact as possible on that rudimentary human level. The heaving motions of Bucky’s chest were more controlled now, his senses returning as his rush of arousal faded, the steady ache of want replacing all-consuming heat.

Bucky nosed at Steve’s neck needily, and he was rewarded with a contented hum as Steve slung an arm around his waist, effectively tangling their bodies together. Bucky was warm and lax, a little uncomfortable as the urgency as the situation dwindled into a quiet stretch of steadily decreasing pants and soft, absentminded murmurs. Steve opened his eyes to look at Bucky, wanting to gauge his reaction—his gaze blue and fond, at complete and utter ease with his surroundings. He smiled breathlessly in reply.

As the haze of want dissipated, replaced with a sun-warm glow of secure, intimate understanding that stretched between the two of them, Steve allowed himself to lean forward and kiss Bucky, trying to convey everything still left unsaid—and he grinned when Bucky returned the kiss in kind.

*

It became easier after that; being able to kiss and feel and ask for more in touches that aren’t laden with repressed desire and hesitant uncertainty. Although the chaste contact remained—sleeping in each other’s name for the sake of reassurance that the other person was there, fleeting kisses on the morning that tasted of toothpaste or orange juice, or the musk of aftershave and honey shampoo in the night.

But now the feeling ran deeper, following the thread of a more visceral need. Sometimes Bucky needed a source of intimacy to keep him grounded amidst the fray—chasing the touch—the brand—of Steve’s hands all over his body, the steady, solid weight resting against him, always connected to him in one way or another.

And other times Steve just needed reassurance that Bucky was there and that he was whole—kissing harsh promises into his lips in the dark, the slow rutting of their hips in the pre-dawn glow of morning, bracketing him against the kitchen counter and dropping to his knees like he intended to keep Bucky there forever.

Yes, it could be a little frantic and sudden and rushed, but it was exactly what they both needed. After so long spent wandering this earth alone or confused or hurt beyond repair, it felt as if every scar and cold rebuttal and long repressed denial of their true feelings had to be redone, remade.

And, for the smallest moments in between, when the sugar-spon softness of sunlight illuminated Bucky—his smile easy and broad, his posture lazy and relaxed—or Steve; laughing so loud his shoulders shook with the force of it, not thinking past the next press of Bucky’s lips to his own—against the rumpled bedsheets, they dared to hope that it might actually turn out okay.

But hope was a dangerous thing.

*

The metallic fist slammed into his chest _hard_ , violently jolting Steve awake. He reacted on instinct, moving to escape the constricting sheets of his and Bucky’s bed, but before he had barely rested the weight of his upper body on his palms a heavy weight was flung onto his chest, folded legs pinning his arms to the mattress. His head snapped back against the headboard, his skull flaring with sharp stab of pain.

He tried speaking, but the words were strangled from his throat, choked. An indestructible fist tightened around his neck, crushing his windpipe, squeezing so hard even Steve was worried his bones would break under such extreme duress. Steve fought to free himself—kicking, thrashing, arching off the bed, trying to gain some sort of control—but his attempts were futile.

Bucky leaned closer, his eyes cold, his face twisted in a mask of nonchalance.

Steve strained to say his name, to call out for him.

The splintering pressure was alleviated from his neck and Steve believed—for the smallest, most fragile moment—that maybe it was going to be okay. That maybe Bucky had reverted back to his real self, the one who was so broken and battered it would take him years to relearn how to function as a human should, yet he still never stopped trying.

But Steve watched—in the dim shadow-streaked light of the too-silent apartment—in object horror as Bucky pulled his clenched, silver-gleaming fist back and crack of blinding pain followed as the metal made contact with Steve’s jaw.

A rush of adrenaline filled his veins, dulling the sting of betrayal and fear and hurt, but Steve could do no more than bear it as Bucky repeated the action—a blow to his cheek, his teeth, his nose. A familiar taste flooded his mouth, a metallic tang which coated his tongue and rested on the roof of his mouth. He felt the cartilage of his nose break and shatter, dislodged, and soon multiple hair-thin fractures fissured through the bones of his face.

The pain was agony, but through it all Steve could not tear his gaze from Bucky.

He was the Winter Soldier—detached, working on orders alone, without feeling. It was startlingly clear that Bucky had slipped back into the identity of a war-honed weapon, more machinery than man—but Steve was unable to discern if he was salvageable or not.

There had been no obvious triggers—it had been any other day, quiet and ordinary, both of them falling to sleep after a few hour spent staring at the mindless buzz of the TV. Bucky had just, simply, gone to sleep and woken up as a completely different man.

There had been no warning, nothing.

And Steve looked at Bucky—the blood splattered across his features almost black in the gloom, rendered helpless under his brutal onslaught of punches, struggling to do more than breathe—and he didn’t know if he could save him.

“Bucky,” Steve gasped between blows, the name slipping unbidden from his lips—raw, shaking, needy.

Bucky had barely mad more than a sound now—save for the sickening, rhythmic crack of metal on bone—but at Steve’s quivering, helpless tone he hesitated for the briefest moment of time. His arm hung suspended behind him, muscles coiled tight with a single-minded drive to complete his mission, to _hurt_.

“I’m your friend,” he said, because he had done so before—so why it wouldn’t work now?

“You’re my mission.”

The execution was sloppy, lacking the finesse of his earlier hits. Steve realised Bucky was faltering in his actions—he was feeling, he was remembering. Whatever had overcome him wasn’t permanent—it could be broken, and it could be fixed.

Steve saw an opportunity—in the space of time where Bucky leaned back to throw his inertia into another punch, his weight distributed further backwards and alleviated from Steve’s chest—and took it. He lunged forward, knocking Bucky aside as he launched off the bed, hitting the hardwood floor and rolling on impact. As Steve quickly rose onto his feet a flash of slim brass—a lamp?—entered his vision and he narrowly dodged Bucky’s deadly swipe.

Bucky followed him onto the floor, viciously swinging the lamp with an acidic vehemence that curdled Steve’s stomach on sight. He dodged the hit, feigning to the right before in preparation for a well-aimed jab at Bucky’s exposed side—Bucky was a southpaw, he always weak on his left.

People usually tried to lean to the right to garner the least amount of impact possible because Bucky was known to hit hard. And his past opponents were then forced to swing at Bucky’s left, so Bucky was never prepared for an intentional blow to his right, which was usually left open in lieu.

Bucky swung on his left, but Steve had been prepared for that exact thing long before Bucky had even consciously made the decision to use his metal arm. With a fluid-like grace, Steve leaned backwards and braced his feet apart before grabbing a hold of Bucky’s metal arm and ripping him forward, his fist sliding up between their bodies to land a solid, bone-crushing blow on Bucky’s left.

He grunted in pain, not expecting a hit that so clearly pinpointed his weakness and doubled over. Steve reached for Bucky’s hair in a vicious grip and bought his knee up into Bucky’s face, meaning to hinder rather than to incapacitate. At the stark sound of cartilage breaking amidst the whirlwind of anger and pain, and hearing the plaintive cry that followed, Steve was snapped out of his fighting reverie.

This was Bucky—he was hurting Bucky.

Steve’s fists dropped immediately, face twisted into a helpless expression of concern as he tried to coax Bucky into raising his head, his fingers gentle and light over his bloodied, hair-streaked face. But when Bucky opened his eyes there was nothing but an endless void of naked fury and he slammed Steve backwards, catching him by surprise and using it to his full advantage.

Bucky forced Steve into the window, the structure cracking and breaking beneath his broad back on impact. Shards of glass rained down, whatever jagged spikes were still lodged in the frame slicing through flesh and skin and fabric. Bucky was shirtless, completely vulnerable to the onslaught of glass, and the dark lines of blood which marred his chest and face didn’t Steve escape.

“I don’t know who you are!” Bucky shouted, gripping at the collar of Steve’s shirt without relent.

“You do. You know me—”

“No I don’t!”

He threw Steve bodily across the room, and he landed with a thud that echoed in his very bone marrow, skidding across the floor. On his hands and knees, disorientated, Steve could only barely register the sounds of Bucky approaching—quick, confident strides—before his head snapped back at the sudden impact of a calculated kick. Blood gushed over his mouth, thick and foul, and he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t—

Steve’s heart was beating in a loud and pounding rhythm, and he was scared—so, so scared.

“Bucky,” Steve gasped out, reaching for Bucky on his knees, at his complete and utter mercy.

Bucky faltered for a moment, and that small ray of hope was enough to sustain Steve.

“You’re my best friend—”

Another punch which caught his chin, the force breaking skin.

“You never left my side, not even when—”

Pain exploded through his skull, coherency replaced by a concussive haze which clouded his thoughts.

“I can’t survive this world,” he yelled, “not without you!”

Maybe it was the frayed memory that instigated a return to himself—of a raging fire licking at Bucky’s skin, his mind addled and limbs heavy with experimental drugs in a draughty Italian military base, calling hoarsely for Steve across a burning inferno. His plea was laden with everything he couldn’t say—would never say—and afterwards he promised that wherever Steve went Bucky wouldn’t be too far behind— _that little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight. I’m following him._

Bucky’s chest was heaving, rising with the motion of his arm and falling once his fingers laid waste to the mangled structure of Steve’s face. Although Bucky’s repeated actions of pulling back and thrusting forward in vicious, calculated hits had steadily lapsed. Air escaped his mouth in harsh wheezes. His eyes were wild, lips open and quivering. His entire body quaked with the effort to fight.

Steve was hurting, glass and splinters embedded in his skin, his body abused beyond normal recognition. His flesh was a battered and raw pulp, bruising where the skin hadn’t broken and bones singing with pain. But he couldn’t let that deter him—whatever suffering he experienced due to physical pain did not to equate to the poignant ache of loss. Steve would rather live crippled and weak than see Bucky fall from the train with his arm outstretched one more time.

Steve swallowed dryly before speaking. “You know me, Buck. It’s just me. It’s Steve.” He faltered in his own name, his strength wavering as horror and confusion began to dawn in Bucky’s eyes. He was remembering, slowly, and sometimes that was worse than the blank slate of clinical nothing he’d reverted to. “It’s _Steve_.”

Bucky reeled back marginally, stopping once his tight grip on Steve’s shirt held him firmly in place, like he’d forgotten it was even there. He looked down at his flesh hand like it wasn’t his own, quieting, the rage in his gaze fading.

“You’re okay, it’s just me.” Steve ensured his voice was soft, placating. “It’s Steve.”

“Steve?” Bucky’s question was child-like and tenuous—the sound almost heartbreaking.

“I’m here, it’s okay.”

Bucky reached forward in a careful yet terrified action, like he was afraid any sudden movement would break the momentary spell of fragile respite. But in the murky shadows of the apartment, nothing more than the orange glow of the streetlamps outside to act as a source of light, Bucky’s metal arm gleamed. His gaze flickered from Steve’s hopeful face to the glinting silver of his limb, the countless streaks of blood rendered almost black against the durable metal alloy.

“Bucky—”

Bucky wrenched his hand back with an aborted sense of revulsion, desperately trying to separate himself from anything that resembled Steve—trying to put miles and miles of space between them. He couldn’t hurt him, he couldn’t do that again—he couldn’t rob the world of the one last shred of good it had left.

“Bucky,” Steve wobbly scrambled to his knees, “Bucky, I’m okay—”

“Don’t. You’re not okay, don’t say that to me. Don’t pretend it’s alright.” Bucky was rambling, incoherent frayed sentences spilling from his mouth as he gripped the roots of his hair and pulled. It hurt, it hurt so much to think and remember what he’d done. And Steve was there, swaying on his feet, bleeding and beaten because of him. “Don’t. Just _don’t._ ”

Steve tried once more, his voice barely more than a tremor. “Bucky, it’s okay.”

Bucky shook his head from side to side violently in an attempt to dislodge the memories from his head—the feeling of Steve’s flesh and bones cracking under the brutal onslaught of his fists, the slick wetness of blood splattered across his knuckles, how visceral and _good_ it felt to finally exercise his pent-up anger of every wrong he’d ever experienced. And when he dared to look at Steve bile surfaced hard and fast in the back of his throat and he couldn’t fathom being here anymore.

Bucky leaped over the bed and disappeared through the bedroom door before Steve could even attempt to rectify the situation. His stomach twisted at the realisation that Bucky could cross the threshold outside and never come back, and Steve ran to catch him before he could do so. His feet slipped on glass, lacerating the soles of his feet. He absently wiped at the blood gushing from his nose before he soon choked on it. But as Steve first stumbled into the hallway he heard the defiant sound of a nearby door slamming shut—the bathroom.

Bucky hadn’t run—he’d just locked himself in the one place Steve would need a crowbar to get into.

Steve’s fingers ghosted over the doorknob. “Bucky?”

No answer.

Eyebrows creasing, Steve called out for Bucky again. Once it had become clear that Bucky wasn’t going to offer any sort of reassurance on his part, Steve reverted to more desperate tactics. He knew he could’ve knocked the door of its hinges with two well-placed blows from his shield, but that was currently hidden away under a foot of reinforced steel and concrete at Stark’s tower—he’d been unwilling to so readily take up the mantle of Captain America just yet.

So, Steve threw his entire body weight against the door instead, shoulders braced to withstand the impact, the force knocking the very air from his lungs. He stumbled backwards, shaking his head once to clear his vision before repeating the action. Steve beat upon the door again and again and again, spent from the exertion of his fight and running on a meagre trickle of adrenaline, his efforts slowed. It barely hurt—nothing really did when he was like this, a single-minded determination driving him forward, especially when that purpose was focused solely Bucky.

There was blood in his mouth and splinters roughening his palm into a pulp and glass embedded in his skin, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Because Bucky was behind the door and Steve would rather cut off his own arm than let him ruminate over his guilt and sorrow alone.

And so the wooden foundations of the doorway began to quake, the entire structure straining under Steve’s persistent onslaught. His elbow forced a pointed dent into the wood, his shoulders pushing the door into a warped, concave shape. The door groaned and ached before—finally—breaking open, the lock ripped in two as Steve burst inside.

His gaze frantically searched the interior of the bathroom, assessing every minute detail with an analytical eye that could only belong to the keen senses of a hardened soldier. There was a trail of blood—first full and dripping at the threshold before growing wider, smeared wetly along the stark white tiles of the floor in a disconcerting shade of crimson. He traced the bloodied line to the expansive claw-foot bathtub, to the heaving mass of dark hair and pale skin, emanating with the smallest murmur of broken sobs.

“Bucky,” Steve whispered, jaw tightening.

Bucky stiffened on reflex, curling in on himself further, trying to occupy the least space as possible.

“ _Bucky_.”

This time he turned his head in a slow, painful movement, like it took him a great deal of effort to do so. His anguished blue gaze flickered over the rim of the bathtub to meet Steve’s, reminding him of that night on top of an apartment building in D.C. His eyes may have been darkened with blood and bruises rather than tactical camouflage paint now, but the agony was still evident in his eyes—that silent, screaming plea for something he couldn’t name, something that didn’t involve the taint of violence.

“Don’t,” Bucky said before Steve could even manage to form any kind of response.

“But—”

“Don’t.”

Steve hand clenched into an involuntary fist because—no, he was not going to just stop. He wasn’t going to let the constant lead-heavy weight of guilt consume Bucky until he could no longer look at Steve, until touch was replaced with longing, and words were replaced with silence. This was as good as it was going to get and he was not going to let them both lapse back into that dangerous state of mind were suicide—pure and absolute self-destruction—seemed like the only possible outcome.

“No,” he ground out, shaking all over—be it fear, apprehension, or pain.

Bucky wasn’t looking at him—he hadn’t done so for a while now.

“I’m not going to ignore what happened, Bucky, and as much as you want to forget that you ever hurt me—and I know you about the nightmares, I know that worry that you’ll kill me one day, I do—I can’t just let that slide. We need to talk about it and you need to accept that I’m never going to have you without the Winter Soldier.” Steve was panting now, his movements choppy and his tone firm, furious. “And I need to let you do your own thing; encourage you to actively pursue things that don’t directly include me, because that kind of co-dependence is unhealthy—”

“Don’t.” Bucky warned with a steel edge—but the tremor to his voice belied his composure.

“I’m not going to do that. Not when I know this will eventually destroy us if we don’t start trying to do more than exist, to do more than survive. We have to start living, Buck. There is more to the world than this apartment and each other, there are people and places and things I still want to do.” He hadn’t realised he had wanted anything besides Bucky until now, but at noticing the stricken expression that crossed Bucky’s face at Steve’s admission he rushed to rectify the situation. “I didn’t mean I don’t care about you,” he grated, “don’t even think that. I meant that we can’t be restricted to four walls, a roof, fortnightly trips to a supermarket and even less frequent contact with other people.”

Steve hadn’t realised that Bucky had turned in the tub, that he was facing him sidewards now rather than completely ignoring Steve. And, with a sort of aborted surprise, Steve realised he had also taken a step or two closer during his tirade. It wasn’t much—a shout into the abyss, a hand outstretched in the darkness—but they both knew it was something.

“James Buchanan Barnes,” Steve said, absent of all prior anger, “I love you.” His mouth twisted into a weak parody of a smile at his words, his chest ringing hollow at Bucky’s lack of reaction, but he didn’t let it deter him. “I loved you before I even knew what it was, and you’re my best friend in the world. You’re the one thing that remained constant in my life; no one else can claim they’ve experienced half of what I have except for you, and the fact that you managed to stay with me means more than fucking anything. So don’t for a second doubt what I feel for you.”

After a beat of quiet in where Steve fought to regain control of his breathing, his rapid-fire spew of repressed confessions, Bucky decide to contribute to the noise rather than to the silence.

“But?” Bucky prompted, his voice paper-thin and wavering.

“But we need to actually involve ourselves in this world instead of simply bearing witness to it.” Steve licked his dry, split lips between thoughts, wincing at the sharp burst of pain. Bucky ducked his head at the action, his features slack with defeat. “But I’m also perfectly content to spend the rest of my life with you, wherever the hell you want to be, okay? I trust you and I need you to know that even when this godforsaken world burns to the ground that I will still be with you.”

Bucky swallowed, his limbs limp and feet scraping and slipping against a layer of blood and glass in the bottom of the tub. His arms were lopped around his knees, a picture of a man who had been stripped down to nothing over and over throughout his existence, forced to live without an identity or freedom of choice for so long that it was almost impossible to expect him to ever gain possession of such things again.

Like flipping an unseen switch, Bucky’s body went rigid and his shoulders squared in a defensive stance, and Steve thought despondently that Bucky had made the decision to leave, to deny himself the simple luxury of any form of human emotion or attachment. But as he turned to look at Steve, his eyes lucid and resolve hardened, it was clear he was going to do anything but.

“Till the end of the line?” Although it was a question, he phrased it like a statement. There was no room for doubt or trepidation or fear—Bucky was committing to Steve, to more than a husk of a normal, healthy human existence.

It was final, it was everlasting.

“Till the end of the line.”

*

Through a long and tedious span of the night, Steve had convinced Bucky that he was allowed the simple human pleasure of sharing space. The stilted gap of self-imposed exile slowly dissipated as Steve took one step closer, and another, until he hovered at the edge of the bathtub.

Steve’s gaze flitted over whatever part of Bucky was exposed—face, hands, legs, feet. He could still see shards of glass shining at the crown of his head, some even embedded in the bare skin of his arms. Most of the damage was restricted to external scrapes, but his nose was bent out of shape and the stressed mechanisms of his arm strained with every small movement. But their collective wounds had already begun to heal, the steady flow of blood stemming to a trickle, and then to a complete stop. He was healing—they were both healing.

“I need to clean you up, okay?” Steve said, hands outstretched in a calming gesture.

Bucky didn’t look at him; he could barely muster the strength to listen to Steve without wanting to scream. Although he agreed to it, he didn’t want Steve to be here. He didn’t even want to look at him.

Jaw clenching at Bucky’s lack of response, Steve shifted over to the sink to open the cabinet below. He rummaged through the sparse, rudimentary contents—towels, soap, plastic razors, shaving cream, extra shampoo and conditioner—to find the fully stocked first-aid kit he’d stored there upon moving in. Steve opened it on the sink counter, searching through the collection of medical supplies for some gauze, alcohol wipes, or cotton swabs, anything that looked non-threatening.

But at the sound of metal clinking against plastic, Bucky glanced at the first-aid kit. Before he could even begin to gain control of his body the sight of surgical scissors and other medical paraphernalia made him freeze. And soon his consciousness wasn’t in Steve’s bathroom anymore, trembling in a tub—he was trapped to a leather chair which was bolted to the floor. There was electricity running through his brain, searing him, and although it hurt more than he could ever put into words he had long resigned himself to that fate. He didn’t want to remember, he didn’t want to feel, he didn’t want to re-learn the fact that a blond man he’d once knew—maybe even loved—had perished in the ice he’d been reborn in.

Suddenly, Bucky felt the feather-light pressure of touch to his chin, tipping his head upwards. He was blinking furiously to erase the images from his mind, fighting, surging forward to try and find some form of escape. He felt flesh under his palms, a toned expanse of muscle so familiar that it settled something raw inside of him, and warmth followed soon after.

He was warm, he wasn’t cold, not cold—he was _warm_.

Bucky gasped, lips soundlessly forming a name along Steve’s collarbone. Without maintaining any prior pretences of holding Steve at length, he clung to him, he held on without relent. He reached desperately for purchase, gripping onto handfuls of fabric and fingers digging into flesh, anchoring himself to the very feeling of Steve.

There were reassurances whispered into Bucky’s hair, and a broad, comforting hand pressed to his back or cradling his head. He leaned into the touch. He chased it. He _craved_ it.

Bucky wasn’t okay—he was far from any semblance of sanity or stability—and there was no telling if he would ever recover, but _this_ —reaching out for Steve in the abyss and knowing that he was always there, that he could always depend on him—made it easier. It made it bearable.

Bucky soon drifted down from the unspeakable terror that had seized him, still nestled in the circle of Steve’s arm, still holding on without the means of every letting go. He remembered Steve asking something and he remembered mutely nodding his agreement, unable to speak just yet. Bucky whimpered at the loss of Steve’s heat and weight as he pulled away, but he quieted once Steve pulled him up to sit on the outward edge of the tub.

Slowly, methodically, Steve cleaned the glass from the bottom of the tub and deposited it in the trash before wiping the worst of the blood from his and Bucky’s skin. He reset Bucky’s broken nose in a few short, decisive movements before the growing swelling could obstruct his assessment of the injury.

Steve stopped between tasks to lay a hand on Bucky’s shoulder, cheek or thigh, trying to ground him. He didn’t try to kiss him; he didn’t do more than offer comfort where it was needed of him. It wasn’t sexual or intense in any conceivable way, but it was an intimate display of untold affection, of trust.

Steve started to run a bath, adding Epsom salts to the water for its healing properties, stepping back to stand between Bucky’s open thighs. His fingers hovered at the rounded curve of Bucky’s forehead, brushing the hair from his vacant eyes. And then he pulled his ruined grey T-shirt, discarding it whole in the hamper for later disposal. His pants soon followed—wincing slightly at the pull of his abused muscles, the skin stretched taught at multiple wounds—and then he was kneeling at Bucky’s feet.

Reaching for Bucky’s waistband with the most chaste intention in mind, Steve looking up at him for permission. Bucky nodded without making eye contact. Steve stripped Bucky of his pants, pulling it over his hips and legs with a gentle care not to hurt him.

“You ready?” Steve asked softly as the bath was brimming with too-hot water.

Bucky whispered his reply, complaint as Steve directed him into the tub. Once he was fully submerged, streaks of red mingling in the water around him, sloshing at his chest, Steve followed suit. He slipped in behind Bucky, legs bent wide to accommodate another body pressing backwards into him, arms curling around Bucky’s waist protectively. Steve didn’t complain—he barely even talked—as Bucky settled in his embrace, breathing deeply. He knew that tonight wouldn’t entail more than silent reassurances.

To be honest, Steve didn’t know what to do beyond tonight. He thought about calling Sam, or even Tony or Bruce, but he pushed every single train of thought from his mind soon enough. He wasn’t in the right mental state to be actively making decisions tonight. Not now.

Instead, Steve reached for a cloth that wasn’t already soiled with his efforts to clean up. He began to wash Bucky in long, measured strokes, mindful of his reset nose and metal arm. He treated Bucky like glass, knowing that it was the one instance where he would be able to without objections. He washed the blood clean from Bucky’s body, allowing their injuries to soak in the steaming water, knowing the soothing effects of the dissolved Epsom salts would offer various medicinal benefits.

It was slow and painful and tenuous procedure. Steve allowed Bucky to rest back against him, supporting his entire weight as he manoeuvred his head to the side or lifted his arms above his head with a tender care, as not to injure Bucky further. He paid attention to scrubbing the dark rings of crusted blood that circled his fingertips, and soothed the swollen flesh of his nose, trying to erase all traces of conflict, of pain.  He ran his fingers over Bucky’s scalp, threading honey-scented shampoo through his hair to remove the evidence of blood or even smaller pieces of glass.

As Steve hands absently traced patterns over Bucky’s collarbone, his head pressed back into the Steve’s chest, and he felt Bucky’s breathing slow. Rather than a harsh wheeze or non-existent whisper, it had been lulled into a contented hum. Steve knew that even though Bucky wasn’t exactly stable, he was comfortable. Maybe being at ease in his surroundings was more likely than expecting Bucky to ever fully recover, and maybe that was just a stage they had to overcome—maybe not.

Again, Steve let the silence lapse into a warm trickle rather a cold absence of noise.

No words were spoken; there were no confessions or false promises uttered.

It was quiet, and it was steady.

It was experiencing untold horrors and being pushed to the point of suicide but being inexplicably bought back by a former shade of a person you once knew. It’s loving a person with your whole entire being when you can barely remember the integral principles that make you an individual person. It’s—

It’s—

It’s promising to follow someone home, even when home loses all meaning.

_Epilogue_

“Are you sure?” Steve asked, his fingers resting lightly on Bucky’s elbow—a comforting, reassuring weight.

He turned in the confined space of the elevator, his dark head tipped close to Steve’s. He never seemed to stop seeking contact, whether it be in public or private—the notable lack of space between their bodies or the hovering presence of a hand, arm or lower back speaking legions.

Bucky nodded, offering Steve a fleeting smile as his fingers twitched by his side on nervous habit. To quell the urge to shake and tremor he reached for the lapel of Steve’s tan jacket, gripping the fabric tight, resting his forehead on the warm expanse of Steve’s chest. Bucky exhaled shakily as he felt a broad hand rest on the slope of his lower back, pulling him closer.

“Really?” A gentle amusement was evident in Steve’s voice.

“I’m okay, Steve.”

“Just a little nervous?”

He mumbled his reply, leaning further into Steve’s familiar body heat.

The elevator doors slid open with a metallic hum, revealing an expansive, illustrious interior. Steve hadn’t expected to visit Stark’s tower so soon, but as Bucky had been willing, so was Steve.

They’d allotted time to their own personal endeavours, trying to find a balance between each other and life that couldn’t be perceived as an unhealthy co-dependency. Now Steve’s mornings were dedicated solely to running with Sam, and maybe even Clint or Nat if the cards were in play. Thor had taken a liking to challenging him to pool sometimes. He saw Bruce on the regular, although the physicist kept insisting he wasn’t that kind of doctor Steve thought it was as close as he would ever get to a psychiatrist. Bucky had even deigned it appropriate to arranging a private session or two with Bruce—usually returning with shaking hands and a tight smile. Tony tried to organise a few doomed meetings at a local bar or café as he was the usual culprit of inefficient time management.

It wasn’t much—not by far—but it was more than Steve could really hope for in comparison to where he’d been over four years ago. There was no denying their relationship was fraught with a considerable number of problems—a rift of tension forever threatening to break, spilling forth lies or suppressed anger and pain. But it was countered by intermittent bursts of new memories, ones Steve even dared to cherish more than the fragments of his past life.

It wasn’t exactly the stuff poets would write about, but it was good. It was a promise. It was hope.

“Buck?” Steve prompted.

Bucky turned to face the larger blond man. His gaze was clear and blue, expectant. Steve’s head dipped forward to capture Bucky’s lips, sighing at the sweet, familiar taste of their kiss—something he’d long grown accustomed to. Steve felt a hand curl around his shoulder possessively, and he allowed his fingers to softly graze the stubbled flesh of Bucky’s neck in return, holding him in place. No one pushed to deepen the kiss or turn it into anything more than a reassuring press of lips.

“What was that for?” Bucky asked when they had pulled apart, standing so close he was breathing the same air as Steve. He still grasped Steve’s jacket without the intention of ever letting go, fingers digging into the toned flesh of his shoulder.

“You know why,” Steve said softly, nudging his nose with Bucky’s playfully.

Bucky smiled in response, knowing that he couldn’t voice the exact words just yet—

_I’m proud of you._

_And I—_

“Captain Rogers,” the sound of Jarvis’ crisp English accent interrupted the intimate moment, “Mr. Stark wishes for me to relay the information that he knows you’re here. And he hopes you haven’t been engaging in any questionable activities with Sergeant Barnes in the elevator that would warrant wiping an entire reel of surveillance footage.”

Steve huffed in exasperation, glancing up as if to pinpoint the location of the prim, disembodied voice. “Tell Tony we’ll be there in a second,” he said in hopes of momentarily appeasing the riotous tech-genius billionaire.

“Sergeant Barnes?” Bucky repeated, the edge of his mouth curling into a self-indulgent smile.

Steve rolled his eyes before directing Bucky out of the elevator with a hand pressed to the small of his back. He could feel the thread of tension return to Bucky’s body as they neared the main source of noise within the floor level. In a means of placating Bucky, to settle him, he stopped to kiss his cheek lightly. He kept his head close, waiting for the shaking up-and-down motion of Bucky’s assuring nod. Once Steve had ensured Bucky was calm enough to continue, he pulled him forward by his hand, fingers intertwined.

They reached the threshold of a spacious seated living area, complete with an expansive panoramic view of Manhattan.

“Bucky,” Steve said, still maintaining a link to Bucky through clasped hands although his gaze was trained firmly on the incredible host of people before him, “meet Earth’s mightiest heroes, and my greatest friends.”

**Author's Note:**

> There's that cheesy ending I promised. I tried to end it on a light note to counteract all the feels.
> 
> Find me on [tumblr](http://diggitydamnsebastianstan.tumblr.com/), chilli peppers


End file.
